Şükrü Erbaş

The main themes in Şükrü Erbaş’ poetry, filled with often overlooked and ignored details, are an astonishment at nature, a rebuttal of the emotionlessness of nature, and and investigation of the way people feel when faced with nature, time and eternity. In his early poems Erbas dealt more with individual human relationships, but over time, without ever abandoning his initial path, he broadened his subject matter.

Erbas writes in a simple, spare language so that a reader who is not encumbered by prejudice or negative conditioning against poetry can connect to his poems. His lucid language constructs a bridge between the real world and poetry. With dreams, thoughts and metaphors he creates a house for a new world. While his language is often not that of daily discourse, it is also not a stranger to it. He expands the very possibilities of language. In an old interview he once spelled his method out in the following terms: “What I do is to call myself into being in language and free reality from the torment of ordinariness.” Over the 40 years of his poetic adventure, Şükrü Erbaş has changed form, style and  themes but without ever abandoning the honorable struggle for a better world.