Entrances

by George Messo

"Entrances" is the second collection by poet and translator, George Messo. The poems are heavily influenced by his years living in Turkey and they open up new worlds for the Anglo-American lyric meditations on the Other, not travelogues. As Peter Didsbury said of this volume in "There's a lovely spaciousness and sense of things and persons held in air. It seems to me that Messo is somehow bringing a whole region and set of cultures back into the European sphere. Any book which so beautifully invents for us the Choruh River and eleventh-century Georgia is OK by me."

Genres: Poetry

84 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2006

Reviews

[Rosamund Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book may not be as good as Messo's later collection, Violades and Appledowns, but this is still better than almost all contemporary poetry. Messo's use of imagery to create emotion and explore place is breathtaking. He reminds me of Basho at his best. He has such a keen eye and ability to sketch a place, a moment, in a few words, but in a manner that remains with the reader forever. Thematically, he is not doing anything astonishingly different from other modern poets, but his use of language is both original and far more effective than anything I have seen recently. His poetry has the quality that only the best poets achieve: it feels inevitable, and it journeys to the space beyond language, where words become useless and only images remain. I am amazed he is not better known, and I plan to read as much of his work as I can.