The image constitutes a metalanguage, opening up new perspectives, new associations, and new word universes reachable in the mental sense by going beyond the conventional usage of words. Therefore, unlike the daily communication language, words wriggle themselves out of their plain form and establish a world of meanings gradually expanding in the mental worlds of the author and the reader, sometimes coinciding, and sometimes diverging. The poetry language, which varies from the other literary genres in terms of language structure, has a more suitable structure for the use of images. Poetry, which provides a deeper and multi-layered world of meaning by using fewer words, offers a structure that allows both the author and the reader to open up to new worlds in a mental sense. Artists are the common voice of all humanity, together with the society where they live, reaching out to the universal from the individual. The artist, who is aware of the society, geography, and tradition in which they live, and, in a nutshell, of the values forming their identity, is the person who internalizes these values and conveys them to future generations. In this framework, Sezai Karakoç, who writes in contemporary Turkish poetry by preserving the values of the society where he lives, without becoming estranged from himself, has gained a well-merited place in the history of literature. Karakoç, who is aware of his identity in his poetry and tends towards identity construction, opens up to the world starting from the plane of values, creating himself while installing the universe of poetry. The poet who puts his own experiences and what has been lived on the historical plane in focus, knows how to integrate them into the "mirror of time". The “mirror image” also has a distinctive place in this language of poetry, banding together its own history and the history of society and humanity. The primary objective of the present study is to determine which meanings and values are represented by the "mirror" in his poetry.

Anahtar Kelimeler
Sezai Karakoç, image, poetry, mirror, time, identity.