"Thunderrose" by Prof.Dr.Erika Glassen

Yeşim Ağaoğlu turns out to be an artist who has created her own complex world. Reading her poems you are feeling the creative power of her visual fantasy. She does’nt only write poems but is also a visual artist and works with photography, installations and performances. That means her poetical world too is always visual. Her imagery is pictorial, often (melo) dramatic. She gets inspired by paintings and films, is condensing in names and phenomenas of the global mainstream culture metaphorical meanings. Her lyrical self gets involved in courageous role plays. Whores, mermaids, tranvestites, murderers, punks, street musicians, circus artists, extraterrestrials are populating her poems. Small well-knit melancholy or amusing surrealist showpieces are amazing the reader because of their imaginary playfulness, while their deeper meaning is not quite clear at the first moment and has to be deciphered by closer reading. Borders between the real and surrealist, the magic and fantastic dimensions are always fluid. Things are anthropomorphisized, animals and birds represent their fable-like nature. Transformation, confusion, deformation, disguising are omnipresent. Metamorphosis and mutation rescue from stiffness and fear. The poetical self has a sensual physical presence, it is bleeding, melting, licking and spitting. Her inner self is like a dark cave where different creatures, animals and personified emotions as loneliness and fear are living and haunting her, even the poetress herself is falling down and locked up in this dark cave. The natural dichotomies of summer and winter, day and night, life and death are rythmical recurrent experiences close linked to love. In the poetry of Yeşim Ağaoğlu the central theme is love, love as a passion of high frequency which may produce short-circuit. It is a kind of obsession and wants to keep hold of the beloved one in the stable relationship of a mythical couple. This is a specifical tradition in oriental literature as Goethe already realized. Leyla and Mecnun, Yusuf and Züleyha and suchlike are common figures in Ottoman-Turkish classical as well as in Turkish folk literature. But Yeşim Ağaoğlu finds the role models of excellent couples in the modern global world: Heidi and Peter, Dali and Gala, Frida (Kahlo) and Diego, Paul and Beatrice, the spiderman and his wife. But since the loving self is the inferior femal part she is suffering from jealousy and mistrust and always scents betrayal and deceit. She feels threatened by the end of the love and fears to be left alone. Sometimes “the others” are involved being slanderous and destructive. The femal self-confidence thirsty for freedom is unstable, because freedom means “left alone without the beloved one”, that means absolute loneliness. This contradiction may be as well a productive situation in which can be developed the proud identity as a poetress by creative poetic power. So she is able to dedicate her poems to her beloved as precious presents. On the basis of the recollection of common adventures and memories is originated a subtle subjective metaphorical language which is difficult to decipher. On the other hand the offending by desertedness gives rise to an explosive “feministic” outburst of rage against the traitor-beloved who highheartedly and without commitment is enjoying his freedom. These dynamic emotions are producing in her mind fantastic threatening scenarios which by their violent and inhuman consequences remind of the brutal reality of the world. The readers guess here might be political allusions. In such moments the excentric poetical self can be - not without ironical alienation effect – exhilarated unto orgasmic climax of  self destruction and the desire to kill.
A moderate reaction to desertedness however is the impulse to travel to the cities of longing to meet again with the beloved one. But this action deserves the courage to enjoy the freedom by desertedness, the willingness to experience the alienation of the femal individual as well as to pay attention to strange people and the power to sublimate all these things in poetry. 
The fascination of modern cities as London and New York with their crowded underground stations and lonely hotelrooms are unthinkable without the nostalgic bonds to native Istanbul full of historical traditions. Therefore the topogragraphical dimensions of the poetical texts are far-reaching. She succeds in giving fine impressions of city life by local colour and sound for instance jazz musicians in the streets and the call to prayer from the minarets.
In Yeşim Ağaoğlu’s poetical language we find sometimes uncommon untranslatable terms, which she calls “Yeşimce” something like “Yeshimsh”. Her poems are complex. Political polemics or feministic positions are never ideological, they are integrated as natural elements in the complexity of her poetical world. She masters the soft and the rough sound. Her vulnerability is shown by the picture of the dust on the butterfly’s wing and her brutality by the intimate flirtation with the knife. Such contradictions are combined in the picture of the “thunderrose”. Inspite of the dramatical stories and the realistic and surrealistic pictoral power her poems are sometimes difficult to interprete. Instructive is always the first and before all the last line of a poem as the fundamental element of the poetical structure. But there remain always secrets.