Gul Ozseven's new collection captures moments in a life with a directness and simplicity which is all the poet's own. Here there is no frantic reaching for novelty, no attempt to dazzle with verbal pyrotechnics; instead, readers will find a voice of assured quietness, of meditative concentration. Ozseven's poems take the most ordinary daily occurrences - a Sunday lunch at home, a day at school, a wish for a new job - and present them, limpidly, in their own subtle emotional colorations. The result is a collection which is perhaps most moving of all in its deliberate refusal to stoke up the emotional temperature. Ozseven's voice is not that of a rhetorician, bard or virtuoso, but that of a human companion, whose honesty and plainness, before long, earns the trust and respect of her readers.
