April Review / Nisan Kitabı - 2003
	Yaşın, Mehmet, (2001), Don't Go Back to Kyrenia - Poems:1977-1997, translated by Taner Baybars, Middlesex University Press, London, ISBN 1 898253 41 2.
	Mehmet Yaşın (pronounced Yashin), is one of the finest and most unique poets of contemporary poetry in the Turkish language. With his own poetic understanding and style, his poetry and other literary works are well known in both Cyprus and Turkey since 1985, when his first volume of poetry won the Turkish Academy Prize (1995), one the most prestigious literature prizes in Turkey. His poems have been translated into more than ten languages and arranged into music. He has published five poetry collections, and a volume of essays. He is also the editor of The Anthology of early Cypriot Poetry (ninth-century BC to eighteenth-century AD) and The Anthology of Turkish-Cypriot Poetry (eighteenth to twentieth centuries). This Turkish-writing and Cypriot background cosmopolitan poet writes from the borders of Europe with its unknown multiculturalism. This ion of his work provides an idea of his range, complexity and intensity. Don't go to Kyrenia “If you should come to Kyrenia Don’t enter the walls. If you should enter the walls Don’t stay long. If you should stay long Don’t get married. If you should get married Don’t have children.”    From an old Ottoman-Turkish song of Cyprus    Translated by Lawrence Durrell ‘Don’t go to Kyrenia’, they said, but if you do, have no children. hundreds of times they said it, your fault if you paid no attention. It was the same boat that docked, you thought the sail was satin, it was a shroud. They unloaded the songs to the port but they were not the songs of our love the amphoras were filled with sea-blood and those who drank from them were poisoned, but if they didn’t drink, they’d die of the plague, and if they didn’t die, they’d go to war. The lights at the discotheque daze, let them daze whether we die or not we spin in slices of multicolour shadows, let the lights daze, daze . . . I don’t know what tremor of war has petrified Kyrenia but left her eyes wide open, in a confusion of who’s gone away who’s come back, the loved ones who have sailed away, and the dead and the dead have sent back. Kyrenia will be machine-gunned if she moves, and if she doesn’t, she will still be bombed by planes. Love will move, even if we won’t don’t water the garden they said but if you do, don’t dig, there’ll soon be a war, anyway. If we’ll strip down to soldiers in the Fort, whether the geraniums burst open or not, in a tumult of noises, or not bloom at all, around the Loveterranean, our sea. If we light a fire and dance, if we dance in the submarine-caves with LSD and videos and revolvers, we’ll dance, whoever doesn’t dance will lose his mind and who doesn’t lose his mind will drown in salt. Don’t go to Kyrenia they said, the lights at the discotheque, let them daze there’ll soon be a war, anyway, let the lights daze, daze...   .
	Reviews of 'Don't Go Back to Kyrenia"
	Review by New Hope International Poetry Review
	Arts & Culture