What Remains Hidden - Poems - R.F.Güzel-Poetry Series, #372

A book of poetry does not carry only the feelings of the period in which it was written. As the years pass, the poet's experiences, losses, discoveries, and newly named truths enter the old lines. When a poem written in youth is revisited after a long life, it is not merely corrected; it passes through another age and is tested for a second time.

What Remains Hidden / Saklı Kalan is the result of such an encounter.

A significant part of the poems in this volume is based on texts written during the poet's youth, beginning in the early 1990s. The faith, fervour, love, sense of friendship, attachment to homeland, and expectations for the future that marked those years form the first current of these poems. Yet this book is not simply a collection of old poems reproduced in their original form. The early texts have been read again through the experience of the intervening years; they have been expanded, pared back, at times reconstructed from the ground up, and interpreted anew in the language of the present.

For this reason, What Remains Hidden is the joint work of a young poet who once left these poems in his notebooks and the mature voice that returned to those notebooks many years later.

Judgements that appeared certain in youth are now weighed on a more demanding scale of conscience. Some statements once made from a distance and in a heightened register have been recast through lived experience, from the site of the wound, and in a language that also takes account of the speaker's own failings. The poet neither repudiates his former self nor leaves him untouched where he once stood. He returns to the old lines to discover what must be preserved, what must be abandoned, and what needs to be spoken again.

Ramazan Faruk Güzel is a writer who has produced work in law, journalism, publishing, literature, and poetry at different stages of his life. His professional experience, the social ruptures he has lived through, and his long years of exile can be felt clearly in the background of these poems. Yet this book was not constructed as a documentary account of a single life. Personal experience opens within the poems towards shared human states such as friendship, love, exile, conscience, and death.

Although What Remains Hidden continues the poet's earlier work, it also possesses an independent integrity of its own. Rather than repeating what was said in the past, the book brings forward what remained unsaid through the years, what was left incomplete, and what had to be expressed again in a different language.

The title of the book arises from this. What remains hidden is not only a body of poems forgotten in drawers. It is the pain people conceal from one another, apologies not offered in time, loves understood too late, unfinished prayers, small habits carried after those who will never return, and the inner rooms a person struggles to open even to himself.

These poems do not claim to open those rooms entirely. They seek to make audible the voice coming from within them.

The reader is invited not to meet that voice with ready-made judgements, but to read it beside what has remained hidden within their own life.

Nordic Publishing House