THE Kurdish poet Ilhan Sami Comak was arrested in 1994 while he was still a student, and charged with membership of the banned Kurdistan Workers’ Party.

After 19 days of torture, he signed a confession and was sentenced to death for the crime of “separatism.” The sentence was later commuted to life.

The European Court of Human Rights has since ruled that the conviction was unlawful. Although he has twice appealed against his conviction, both appeals were unsuccessful.

After 28 years in prison, the last seven in solitary confinement, Ilhan Sami Comak is now one of Turkey’s longest-serving political prisoners.

In prison he has published nine books of poetry. Edited by Caroline Stockford (who runs the Ilhan Sami Comak campaign for PEN Norway), Separated from the Sun (Smokestack Books, £9.99) is a selection of poems from each of his books.

It is a beautiful collection, delicate and dreamily defiant. Like most prison-poets, Comak is less interested in the narrow life of prison, than he is in the wide world outside: “What I know of the sea is so little / yet all I want to do is swim!”

Separated from the Sun is an extraordinary and courageous attempt to reconcile himself to “things that are not here”: “No flowers pooling dew, no rivers / overflowing the map. No fresh-baked / smell of sesame bread to summon up / a crowd. There are no women / of selflessness and beauty, no possibility / to stretch out on grass and test the constancy of sky… There are no turnings of the seasons, / no eclipses of the moon. No earth, / no plants in their simple elegance. / Life; separated from the sun. / There’s no direction here. / But there is a way out. / Always a way out.”

Volker Braun is one of Germany’s most important writers, widely regarded as the heir of Bertolt Brecht. Born in Dresden in 1939, he studied philosophy in Leipzig and worked at the Berliner Ensemble and the Deutsches Theatre. He is the author of numerous plays, works of fiction, volumes of poetry and essays.

Great Fugue (Smokestack Books, £9.99) is Braun’s most recent collection, translated by Karen Leeder and David Constantine. The book is partly an attempt to understand the strange, silent world of 2020: “The city is sedated / like a plague patient… The Senate closes all the pubs / The Chancellor advises against social contact / Squad cars / prowl in search of signs of life… Only the machine of profit and loss keeps turning.”

But the book’s larger subject is Nature’s refusal to submit to human ideas of Progress. Drawing on Dante, accompanied by Rudolf Bahro, and with Beethoven’s Great Fugue playing in his head, Braun examines the catastrophic conflict between Science and Nature in the Anthropocene Age. The Mekong no longer finds its delta, fires burn in the dry forests, and the seas and skies are fatally poisoned.

And between despair, irony and bleak laughter Braun is still trying to find “a beaten track / Out of the systems” that have brought humanity to the edge of extinction: “That is your art now, / Being alone, with everyone else… And think things through with mountains and with seas / Just one more summer left to us before it is winter. / You olive trees of Crete, three thousand years old, you mighty Glaciers. Look at what is left, the holdings of the Holocene…”