Author(s): Kapka Kassabova

New Zealand Poetry

Kapka Kassabova is a young Bulgarian emigre poet who writes in English but with a European imagination. Her well-travelled poems speak from different parts of the world and different moments of history, but they always speak of the many ways to be lost and disoriented: in a place, in the past, in fear, in love, in the very quickness of life. The voices speaking here - from a Roman housewife to a Chinese bar-owner in Berlin or an Argentine DJ - are the voices of the heart-sick, the culturally jet-lagged, people from photographs, the tenants of lives, cities and destinies. This is what we all are, have been, or will be. Kapka Kassbova's Someone else's life (2003) was widely acclaimed: 'A book of striking originality in which the poet speaks for those who have been uprooted or dispossessed by, mostly European, history. Always evocative, Kassabova memorialises lives in transit' - Gerry Smyth, Irish Times . 'Kassabova's achievement is to make the emigre life a metaphor inclusive of more general alienation...The evidence of a major talent is unmistakable' - Chris Miller, PN Review . 'This much-travelled volume is always, even in several striking love poems, a record of alienation from the valley strewn with garbage and roses of her homeland. This doubled sensibility is at once new and accomplished, direct and complex' - Fiona Sampson, Poetry Review . 'Someone else's life tells with supreme clarity and fearless candor what it means to be adrift in the last years of the 20th century and the rest of the 21st; it is a book of perpetual exile, of endless comings and goings, in a world that offers neither stability, nor salvation. Still, the very intelligence of this book - skeptical, riveting, passionate - suggests that there may be an answer to the uncertainty that is everywhere around us' - Mark Strand.