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Home>>Poetry>>Guest Poets>>Kapka Kassabova

Kapka Kassabova

Picture
Born in Bulgaria in 1973, domiciled in Auckland and now based in Edinburgh when not roaming the world, Kapka Kassabova is among the most prominent of the younger New Zealand poets and novelists, and is rapidly acquiring the international reputation she deserves. Her main collection of poetry is Someone Else’s Life, published in Britain by Bloodaxe and in New Zealand by the Auckland University Press. For that collection I was delighted to provide a cover note, from which the following is an excerpt.
“In the suitcase that she has mentally lived out of since she was a little girl, Kapka Kassabova has brought the turbulent memories of 20th century European history with her to New Zealand, where she recollects bad dreams in comparative tranquillity, and always with the phrasing of a born musician.”
A new collection, Geography for the Lost, was published in March, 2007 by Bloodaxe. The ten poems here were chosen by the author, from her previous collections and also from work not yet published in book form.
She has a significant publishing event coming up in 2008: Street Without a Name: Childhood and Other Misadventures in Bulgaria, a prose travel memoir which should place her poetry in context even for those critics – some of them among her fellow literati in New Zealand, oddly enough – who have not yet shown themselves capable of realising that her ability to be contemplative about the turmoil of homelessness provides the impulse for a unique poetic excursion.

The Door

Picture
One day you’ll see: 
you’ve been knocking on a door 
without a house. 
You’ve been waiting, shivering, yelling 
words of daring and hope.

One day you’ll see:
there is no-one on the other side
except, as ever, the jubilant ocean
that won’t shatter ceramically like a dream
when you and I shatter.

But not yet. Now 
you wait outside, watching
the blue arches of mornings 
that will break 
but are now perfect.

Underneath on tip-toe 
pass the faces, speaking to you,
saying ‘you’, ‘you’, ‘you’, 
smiling, waving, arriving
in unfailing chronology.

One day you’ll doubt your movements, 
you will shudder
at the accuracy of your sudden age. 
You will ache for slow beauty 
to save you from your quick, quick life.

​But not yet. Hope 
fills the yawn of time.
Blue surrounds you. Now let’s say
you see a door and knock, 
and wait for someone to hear.

Someone Else's Life

Picture
It was a day of slow fever 
and roses in the doorway, wrapped
in yesterday’s news of death.

Snow fell like angels’ feathers 
from a dark new sky, softly announcing 
that some things would never be the same.

I listened carefully to doubts and revisions
of someone else’s life, safe in my room of tomorrow,
a passing witness to sorrow and wonder.

Then night came and I was quickly
drifting inside that life. I was leaving mine.
Snowflakes continued to fall.

The street was deserted and dim.
Shrapnel wounds blossomed in stone walls.
There was no proof of the current decade,

and I could not recall 
the names of faces that I knew
the smell of places where I’d lived

​and why I lay alone now
so close to a vast, empty floor, so far 
from the sun, so far.

Ship Advancing in the Fog

Picture
I don’t know why 
the sound of the horn was near, 
and yet the ocean was not. 
Fog obscures the visible 
and purifies sound,
which is to say that when nothing is clear,
something anticipates it.

In any case, I stood outside the door
and listened to a cargo ship approach,
forge its way past sleeping houses 
and muffled street-lights, 
and I was strangely calm -

​like in a dream where nothing 
surprises you, not giant waves 
advancing from a personal afar, 
nor giant ships.
You are too small to run, 
you stand transfixed by imminent disaster
waiting for it to be too late, 
waiting to be delivered.

Lying with the Ghosts of Berlin

Picture
Tonight is the longest night of the year. 
We lie, patient with the seasons
in the glow of street lamps, 
beneath the outlines of things 
that could be ours, some other time.

To the sound of snow falling, 
we must sleep, again and again
like diving into the soft centre 
of each life we might have had.

Yesterday was the shortest day of the year -
a pale wing that beat just once 
then fell into the twilight of three o’clock. 
The snow has settled. We can hear it breathe.

I say we but I see no one. 
The neighbour upstairs has gone skiing.
The people across have turned off the light 
in their room. The rest of the street is a museum.
I lie on the slab of my bed, whispering:

Whoever else is here now 
will be here tomorrow.
They are measuring the beats 
of my remaining blood. 
They quietly know something

​I am afraid to ask.

Love in the Dark Country

Picture
Tomorrow for twenty-four hours
I’ll be in the same country as you.

The sky will be constantly shifting,
the morning will be green, a single morning
for my single bed. And in the night

as the dark country goes to sleep
a church bell will measure 
the jet-lag of my heart.

I’ll open my suitcase and unfold my life
like a blanket. In the dark country I will lie 
all night and wonder how this came to be:

the one light left in the world 
is your window, somewhere in the land

​of thin rain and expensive trains.
And instead of maps, I have an onward ticket

Hong Kong Transit

Picture
In the city where people take turns
to sleep in a bed,
a man watered his flowers at dusk
on a roof piled with garbage and clouds.

Down in the street,
the shark-fin vendors washed
the evening of its fishy slime
and crouched for a smoke.

In the night, an earthquake knocked
on the door of my sleep.
I looked up at the forest of blocks
leaning down the hill like the spikes
of a dragon moving its tail.

The misty mountain, like all
great local forces, was invisible.
And in the hour of trembling earth I saw:
I had come to the source of an old dream,
the nightmare of outsiders.

You stand at a window looking up
at some cityscape of alien lives,
tall darkness, and fire escapes,
all leaning down, but not offering a place for you,
or any hope that you can wake up

​in a better world.

Glimpses of Ecstasy over the Pacific

Picture
A strange light descended on us tonight. 
The concrete promenade
became the path to a pink secret

The harbour rainbow was the contour 
of some extravagant design
we couldn't grasp

The sea-rocks turned towards the moon 
like silver-foil reflection 
of a world that could be ours
if only we believed in it. 
And that is the problem:
believing is more than seeing

I kept walking and watching 
the miracle shrink behind the hills, 
which is the way of all sunsets

but this one was different, 
this one felt as if 
the last of something would be gone

Some stopped and watched
to keep it longer, while others were afraid 
of endings, and kept their backs to it -

the man in shorts and pulled-up socks,
for instance, his legs the arch
where middle age slumps into old

And suddenly, like him, I was removed
from my best life, here at the centre 
of some old, awful truth, and I walked

behind the moving sky
in a stupor of transience,
in a slow motion of fear

unsure how much time 
remained to me, and how to measure it 
In perfect evenings? Outbreaks of sky? Hope, beauty?

Oceans from a plane? 
Years unfolding like maps? 
I ran to catch it, I needed to know

Then it was gone behind the hill.
Left in semi-darkness, we continued
our crab-like scuttle to the dawn

Calculations

Picture
The fire that lights a candle
cannot be shared between the wick
and the match, it has to be given
like a life.

The body lying on the wet sand
must leave an impression deeper
than the shallow water
coming to erase it.

​May you never recover
from the lightness of my touch.

Berlin - Mitte

Picture
I live in a haunted house.
I have lost my hunger. I have lost my sleep.
When I sleep, my dreams are not mine.

My sense of time is unstable
and I wait for anonymous
midnight visits. I feel that all
that is to come is inevitable.

I have my suitcase close by, but it's empty -
I know I'll be surprised. I'm ready
to leave my possessions behind.
I look for clues around the house.

But the walls are white-washed.
The ceilings are too high.
The floor has been treated with the polish
of this new, confident century.

I sit by the narrow window remembering
those I never knew,
for there is no-one to remember them.
No-one remembers numbers on a plaque.

​I fear they will come one night,
after sixty years of absence.
I will offer them the house of course, the bed,
the kitchen table, but I fear they will say
that what was taken from them
can never be given back.

Angel's Lament

Picture
I’m looking down into a valley of vapours
Where yet another city lies, concealed
and dense with lives I’ve seen 
that have not seen me
for I am citizen of the unknown

All my life, I have wanted this:
to be inside the story
to have a street with a name and a corner shop
to have a window with curtains 
and all the sharp noises of the night
in some city wedged in between mountains 
in some city carpeted with ocean

​To know that I’ve arrived
to be concealed from the terrible 
longing of some stranger 
who will come one day
and stand on top of the mountain, unseen
then vanish, leaving footprints in the air
​
Copyright © 2019
​Built & managed  By Dawn Mancer
  • Home
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    • Glued To The Box
    • The Metropolitan Critic
    • At the Pillars of Hercules
    • As of This Writing
    • The Meaning of Recognition >
      • Introduction
      • Polanski and the Pianist
      • Fantasy in the West Wing
      • Pushkin's Deadly Gift
      • Great Sopranos of Our Time
      • A Memory Called Malouf
      • Bing Crosby's Hidden Art
      • Larkin Treads the Boards
      • The Iron Capital of Bruno Schulz
      • Criticism a la Frank Kermode
      • Fast Talking Dames
      • Rough Guides to Shakespeare
      • General Election Sequence 2001
      • Primo Levi and the Painted Veil
      • A Big Boutique of Australian Essays
      • Cyrano on the Scaffold
      • A Nightclub in Bali
      • Aldous Huxley Then and Now
      • A Man Called Peter Porter
      • Philip Roth's Alternative America
      • The Miraculous Vineyard of Australian Poetry
      • Save Us From Celebrity
    • The Revolt of the Pendulum >
      • The Question of Karl Kraus
      • John Bayley's Daily Bread
      • Kingsley and the Women
      • Canetti Man of Mystery
      • Camille Paglia Burns for Poetry
      • The Guidebook Detectives
      • Zuckerman Uncorked
      • The Flight from the Destroyer
      • Saying Famous Things
      • Insult to the Language
      • The Perfectly Bad Sentence
      • Happiness Writes White
      • All Stalkers Kill
      • Best Eaten Cold
      • White Shorts of Leni Reifenstahl
      • Made in Britain, More or Less
      • Movie Criticism in America
      • Show Me the Horror
      • The Measure of A.D. Hope
      • Robert Hughes Remembers
      • Modern Australian Painting
      • On Diamond Jim McClelland
      • The Voice of John Anderson
      • Niki Lauda Wins Going Slowly
      • Damon Hill's Bravest Day
      • Jonathan James-Moore
      • Ian Adam
      • Pat Kavanagh
      • Starting with Sludge
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      • Zoe Williams
      • Russell Davies
      • Bryan Appleyard
      • Marina Hyde
      • Bruce Beresford
      • Michael Frayn
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      • Injury Time
      • Sentenced to Life >
        • Japanese Maple
        • Sentenced to Life
        • Procedure for Disposal
        • Leçons des ténèbres
        • Driftwood Houses
        • Event Horizon
        • Neuland
        • Echo Point
        • Change of Domicile
        • Holding Court
        • Too Much Light
        • Nature Programme
        • My Latest Fever
        • Nina Kogan's Geometrical Heaven
        • The Emperor's Last Words
        • Winter Plums
      • Nefertiti in the Flak Tower >
        • Whitman and the Moth
        • The Falcon Growing Old
      • Angels over Elsinore
      • The Book of My Enemy >
        • Recent Verse
        • Verse Letters
      • Opal Sunset
      • Other Passports >
        • Recent Verse >
          • The Book of My Enemy has been Remaindered
        • Parodies etc.
        • Earlier Verse
        • Verse Diaries
      • Fan Mail >
        • To Russell Davies: a letter from Cardiff
        • To Martin Amis: a letter from Indianapolis
        • To Pete Atkin: a letter from Paris
        • To Prue Shaw: a letter from Cambridge
        • To Tom Stoppard: a letter from London
        • To Peter Porter: a letter to Sydney
    • Epic Poems >
      • The River in the Sky
      • Gate of Lilacs
      • The Divine Comedy >
        • Hell - Cantos 1-3
        • Purgatory - Cantos 1-3
        • Heaven - Cantos 1-3
      • Poem of the Year
    • Books About Poetry >
      • Somewhere Becoming Rain
      • Poetry Notebook >
        • Listening for the Flavour
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        • Meeting MacNiece
        • The Donaghy Negotiation
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      • Liane Strauss
      • Les Murray
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      • Alan Jenkins
      • Stephen Edgar
      • John Stammers
      • Simon Barraclough
      • Isobel Dixon
      • Christian Wiman
      • Olivia Cole
      • Judith Beveridge
      • Peter Goldsworthy
      • Kapka Kassabova
  • Lyrics
    • My life in lyrics
    • Selected Song Lyrics >
      • Dancing Master
      • Faded Mansion
      • Have You got a Biro I can Borrow?
      • I Have to Learn to Live Alone Again
      • Hill of Little Shoes
      • History & Geography
      • I See the Joker
      • Laughing Boy
      • My Brother's Keeper
      • National Steel
      • Nothing Left to Say
      • Sessionman's Blues
      • Song for Rita
      • Stranger in Town
      • Sunlight Gate
      • The Egoist
      • The Eye of the Universe
      • The Ice Cream Man
      • Femme Fatale
      • The Master of the Revels
      • Thirty-year Man
      • Winter Spring
  • Video
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