Çocuklar İçin Şiirler

The book opens with a short foreword by Memet Fuat addressed to the child reader. The compiler says that, apart from the poems of Fazıl Hüsnü Dağlarca, all of the poems were written for adults; but «Don Quixote», «Gulliver's Travels» and «Robinson» were also written for adults, and children have drawn completely different flavours and meanings from them. The compiler asks readers to read the poems not like a school «recitation piece» but as if talking: unhurried, without shouting, without affectation. The foreword shows from the start how the book should be read.

The first section is three poems by Nâzım Hikmet. The biographical note says the poet was born in 1902, died in 1963, was one of the pioneers of free verse, spent long years in prison for political activity and lived abroad. «Galloping from Far Asia» likens the homeland to a mare's head and says «this country is ours»; «The Japanese Fisherman» is shaped like a song heard from friends: whoever eats the fish caught dies, and the boat is a black coffin; «The Little Girl» is written in the voice of a seven-year-old girl who died in Hiroshima and asks for signatures so that children are not killed. These three poems say the heaviest subject — the death of children in war — in the plainest words.

Asaf Halet Çelebi was born in 1907 and died in 1958, and is introduced as a poet drawn to Eastern as much as to Western culture. His six poems here stand out for strange, sometimes dark images: in «People», a being newly arrived on earth asks those who look like it who they are and gets the answer «we are human»; in «City», houses are boxes and residents beetles; «The Man I Made of Wood» is the memory of a being that became neither human nor tree; «Compassion», «Father Buoy» and «Cat» are gentler poems about children, sleep and loss. The cat crushed by a foot, and childhood crushed with it, is the poem's most moving place.

Cahit Sıtkı Tarancı was born in 1910 and died in 1956, and is introduced in the book as a master who steered clear of the excesses of the new Turkish poetry and split hairs with care. His four poems join childhood, longing for distant places and consolation: «Robinson» calls its hero «clever Robinson» and wants to go with him to an island; «So Lost in Thought» shows a child's eye that turns the empty lot next door into the sky at dusk; in «Childhood» the speaker counts out money to buy back a childhood and says there is now neither an age nor a name nor any knowing who they are; «Good News» is about the future that birds announce.

• The poems are short, most fit on one page, and many images rest on everyday objects seen through a child's eye (a boat, a tree, a cat, a window)
• The language is very plain: even heavy poetic images are given in words a child can follow
• Each poet's section opens with a short biography, and the poems appear with titles and without commentary
• The compiler orders the poets by birth year, 1902–1917, and so shows the sequence of the 1940s generation of new poetry