Bellini in Istanbul

Winner of the 2004 Tupelo Press First Book Competition

“Reading Bellini in Istanbul, I was constantly reminded of Calvino’s Invisible Cities, for Lillias Bever’s richly-textured poems ‘arrive,’ as she tells us, at ‘the boundary or our lives… saddled in the smoke of the other world.’ This smoke is a form of memory and invention, a gauze or veil, through which we find the borderlands of experience to be an expansive geography, where what is real is imagined and what is imagined is real. Bellini in Istanbul is a sophisticated book, a formal and imaginative tour de force.”

—Michael Collier, Judge, 2004 Tupelo Press Contest for First Books of Poetry

About the Author

Lillias Bever grew up in Princeton, N.J., received a B.A. from Vassar College, and an M.F.A. from the University of Oregon. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Gettysburg Review, New England Review, Seneca Review, Pleiades, among others, and has been featured on Poetry Daily. She has been a resident at the MacDowell Colony and the Millay Colony for the Arts, and the recipient of a Seattle Arts Commission award.

Advanced Praise

“Bellini in Istanbul has the finish of voice present in the best poetry, the report on experience and travel of the most interesting people, and the reflective tone of a cultivated inner voice. Though I treasure its descriptive pieces—Italian scenes, Turkish fish markets, comments on and condensations of The Blue Guide—what is the most touching are the poems that intermingle the exotic with the deeply personal—the assessment of a relationship gone bad in a foreign land, then considering a new one aborning; the carrying and birthing of a child thought in terms of Greek myth, and the crisp observations of the world turned into signifiers of the dreamwork which is poetry. Lillias Bever is a gorgeous poet, traveled and travailed, seeking a home in her own strophes.”—Garrett Hongo, author of Volcano: A Memoir of Hawaii

“Winner of the Tupelo Press Judge’s Prize, Bellini in Istanbul is a compilation of free-verse poetry featuring absorbing descriptions of Italian scenes, Turkish fish markets, and other exotic locales as well as deeply personal difficulties. The end of a relationship turned sour in a foreign land, followed by the creation of a new one; the pain and wonder of bringing a child into the world; and the eternal search for meaning in life make for an unforgettable poetic experience. ‘Ezan’: ‘In Bebek, a famous tenor calls / the ezan from Kemalettin’s elegant, dove-grey mosque, // his voice spilling like noon light over the park. / It’s Friday. The devout are washing // off the morning’s dust, their shoes lined up / neatly at the lip of the public fountains.’”–Wisconsin Bookwatch

The Baltimore Review’s Colleen M. Webster has written a erudite and thoroughly compelling review of Bellini in Istanbul.

“While these poems plunge the reader back five centuries, they also serve to remind us that poets, too, often serve a harsh muse. Surely one of these ministers to Bever, who as we move back and forth, museums, to dusty roads, to operating tables, parses out stringently her own suffering and her awareness of it in others.”

Kirk Robertson of the Lahontan Valley News and Fallen Eagle Standard has written a brief review Lillias Bever’s marvellous book of poetry:

Bellini in Istanbul (Tupelo Press) by Lillias Bever is a collection of poems that combines an assaying of Bellini’s being hired as court painter for Mehmet in 1479, notions of Cesarean delivery and archaeological excavation, with memoirs of a love affair between a visiting American and a Turk.

The poems spin a web of overlapping allusions. There are gift horses from Troy, an excavation of a desk drawer, wondering whether artifacts guide or protect us. Objects in the museums begin to speak and she makes speculative assertions about what happens during decapitation, how Bellini undressed the Madonna to make things a little more erotic for the sultan.

The metaphors take on personal resonance in evocations of the cultural clash in contemporary Istanbul, her doomed romance across the straits that separate us, and meditations on the presence of blue in everything: evil eyes, the breath of possibility, how memory becomes mnemonic.”

Alexis M. Smith, reviews editor for Tarpaulin Sky, has written with great perception about Bellini in Istanbul, concluding with the lines,

“The simile of stepping away from a book is an apt one, because it conveys the sense of history as a series of narratives—books written or not, stories told and forgotten, rediscovered and told again. Throughout Bellini in Istanbul we sense the poet’s yearning to preserve experience for the sake of the narrative; and that, ultimately, is what makes Bever’s efforts so satisfying—it feels as if we are participating in a small part of the chronicle of human experience.”

The Oregonian’s BT Shaw has reviewed Bellini in Istanbul., which reads in part:

In all three sections, Bever’s ideas—like William Carlos Williams’—are in things. ‘Teaspoons, dental probes, scalpels, ladles / spoons with bowls bent back at an angle’ is the way a poem called ‘Tools’ begins. Another, ‘Catalogue,’ makes a list—‘Bullets that collide / in mid-air, / broken tobacco pipes, / a shoe / with the foot still in it’—and becomes itself proof that the whole is, sometimes, more than the sum of its parts.

Booklist’s Ray Olson, American Library Association, provides a brief, early review of Bellini in Istanbul.

Format: Paperback
ISBN: 978-1-932195-26-2