The debut poetry collection by the winner of the 2021 Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize, Two Hundred Million Musketeers by Ender Başkan explores the complexities of new parenthood and family life, and anxieties about the future his children will grow up in.
Ender Başkan’s debut poetry collection depicts the intensity of life as a parent of young children. It maps the shifting trains of thought which go with the experience of being a new parent, when one’s attention is drawn in many different directions – between child-rearing and house-keeping, domestic crises, the need to earn a living, and the responsibilities you have to the past as well as to the future, to your own parents and grandparents, as well as to your children. Work, friendships, social life and creative practice are all altered. The poet reflects on his own childhood, and his grandparents’ exile from their homeland in Turkey, to which he returns several times in the course of the book, with his own young family. But there is also an increased awareness of the future, not only to the world his children will grow up in, but to the kind of world that is being built right now, in homes, workplaces, and in social and political allegiances.
Perhaps most tellingly, since Ender Başkan is a poet, he is subsumed in the flood of language, as it emerges from the mouths of his youngsters, indeed from his own mouth, as he talks to them. Words and sounds and the effects of language come to the fore. The imagination of children lends its own wonder and surrealism to that of the poet. His writing is direct, playful, absurd, staunch and political. In these respects, Başkan follows in the footsteps of the previous generation of Australia’s poets of migrant background, all of them masters of language – Pi.O., Chris Mann, Antigone Kefala and above all the late Ania Walwicz, his close friend and mentor.
