In HAPPYAGONY, his debut poetry collection, acclaimed actor and award-winning film producer Mem Ferda guides readers through an intimate exploration of youth, aging, love, heartache, the pitfalls of wealth, and the abiding anguish of familial loss. Spanning decades and continents, Ferda’s poems are imbued with a pervasive melancholy and hard-won wisdom, leavened by flashes of wry humor and searing insight into the human condition. The collection’s emotional register swings pendulum-like between the poles of its title, HAPPYAGONY—a state of being Ferda seems to know all too well. It’s in the reconciliation of life’s joys and sorrows that the poet finds a measure of hard-earned equilibrium.
The book opens with “Youth,” recollections of Ferda’s childhood and early adulthood—from the dusty streets of his family’s village in Turkey to his misspent younger years as an aspiring rebel without a cause. In poems like “Bygone Rebel” and “Man or Mouse,” Ferda recalls, with a mixture of wistfulness and self-effacing wit, a youth spent pursuing beautiful girls and daydreams of luxury. “Childhood Well (Angolem),” a tender portrait of village life centered around a communal water well built by Ferda’s father, is particularly evocative—with memorable images of “Smiling farmers [bringing] their parched donkeys, / their trusty steeds, to quench their thirst with natural cold water.”
In “The Fallacy of Luxury,” Ferda turns a sardonic eye to the follies and affectations of wealth and glamour, skewering the pretensions of the elite art and nightclub worlds of which he has been both participant and observer. Poems like “Golden Gala,” with its “champagne” and “models in golden bikinis,” capture the glitzy veneer of celebrity, while “Urban Rats” offers a withering rejection of status-obsessed corporate culture. Ferda’s poetic voice, though plainspoken and direct, achieves a vivid expressiveness, transforming deeply personal reminiscences into emotionally resonant statements of universal truths. “Memisms,” for instance, conveys Ferda’s philosophy of living in the moment: “Live each day with passion and zest. / Trust your heart as it knows best.”
The book’s most emotionally robust material is found in its closing sections, “Love” and “Grief.” Ferda is a sharp observer of love’s agonies and ecstasies, vividly describing the “wild, crazed euphoria of / never-ending screwing” in “A Cherubic Affair” and the wounding disappointments of a fractured relationship in “The Forest.” But the poems chronicling the loss of family resound most profoundly. Ferda mourns the deaths of his beloved sister Aydın (to whom the collection is dedicated) and his parents in nakedly anguished verses that lay bare the cruelties of fate and the abiding power of love. Remembering his last moments with his sister, in “Aydın,” Ferda writes, “Her absence is painfully evident. Where once her affectionate smile, gracing delicate porcelain features, met me with tenderness each day, now her almond-shaped eyes are gently shut, her head slightly tilted, pressing worryingly on my senses.”
Though at times prosaic and wanting a bit more linguistic virtuosity, HAPPYAGONY is nevertheless an unsparing and ultimately uplifting journey through the universally relatable experiences of a life fully lived, marked in equal measure by love, laughter, loss, and the unending search for meaning and purpose. Mem Ferda’s debut collection is a moving and intimate portrait of an artist as a young man and a nuanced exploration of the human condition.
In HAPPYAGONY, Mem Ferda offers up an intimate self-portrait in verse, an unsparing exploration of life’s joys and losses rendered in plainspoken yet expressive lines that will leave readers aching and uplifted. Weaving recollections of an idyllic childhood, the hedonism of celebrity, and the anguish of familial grief, these poems are a moving chronicle of a life fully lived.
~Edward Sung for IndieReader
