Cloud-Borne Verses- Italic Poems. R.F.Güzel-Poetry Series, #365

This book is not merely a collection of poems. It is the record of a voice carried from youth into maturity, and of a man meeting, after many years, the words he once entrusted to his own inward weather. At first glance, Cloud-Borne Verses seems to rise from old notebooks: from youthful unrest, broken loves, sudden deaths, graveyards, evening cities, nights of prayer, unfinished friendships, and the quiet ache of people who never fully returned.
Yet as the book unfolds, it becomes clear that what is at stake here is not only the private history of a poet. Personal sorrow widens into a human condition. Memory becomes witness. Youthful pain turns into a meditation on existence. For Ramazan Faruk Güzel, poetry is not an ornamented art of feeling. It is a form of inner responsibility. In these pages, a poem may begin as a child hiding in a cemetery, as an elegy for a young friend, as the memory of Bosnia, as the wound of exile, or as a man walking through a winter city toward a minaret at two in the morning, ashamed before God and unable to escape himself.
Language is not used here to decorate grief, but to carry what the heart cannot carry alone. Love, in these poems, is never merely romantic feeling. In "The Two Shores of the Bosphorus, " two people become the opposite banks of the same water, divided by ferries, gulls, mist, and lateness. In "The Hour of Belâ, " love opens onto the ancient metaphysical "yes, " the primordial consent hidden inside longing.
Elsewhere, absence becomes not the lack of another person, but the room in which the self discovers its own incompleteness. There is also a wider historical and moral memory here. "Alia Svetloviç's Diary" does not treat Bosnia as a distant tragedy, but as a wound in the conscience of Europe and humanity. "In the City" looks at street children not as symbols, but as cold bodies abandoned under neon light.
"Nobody, Son of Nobody" gives voice to those whom records, states, documents, and official language fail to see. "After Those Who Left" turns exile into a moral absence: when certain people leave, something in the remaining world also diminishes. The spiritual dimension of the book is equally strong, but it does not become sermon. Its religious language is lived from the inside: shame, return, fear, mercy, supplication, helplessness.
Words such as Fatiha, mercy, resurrection, Elest, belâ, and forgiveness are not decorative references to tradition; they are thresholds through which the speaker confronts his own fragility. The sacred enters the poems less as doctrine than as tremor. Formally, the book resists a single mould. At times it approaches folk song, at times free verse, prayer, elegy, urban monologue, metaphysical meditation, or a dark interior lyric.
This variety is not disorder. It is the record of one life speaking through different ages, wounds, hopes, and registers. Some poems still carry the raw pulse of youth; others bear the slower, more difficult breath of maturity. One of the most important qualities of this volume is precisely that it does not erase its origins. These poems were first born in youth, but they have been revisited with an older consciousness.
The early intensity has not been polished into sterility. It has been questioned, cut back, deepened, and sometimes left deliberately rough where roughness was the more human truth. This is not simply a book of youthful poems. It is a book written by youth and listened to again by age. Cloud-Borne Verses gathers love, death, childhood, exile, conscience, prayer, memory, and the long struggle to remain human.
Some lines are heavy as clouds, some light as rain, some silent as a gravestone. Beneath them all is the same search: for a clean word in a stained age, a true prayer in a scattered heart, and a trace of humanity that might survive us. Nordic Publishing House