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All Roads Lead to the Sea
Book by Kassabova, Kapka
- GenresPoetry
Paperback
First published August 1, 1997
2 people are currently reading
46 people want to read
About the author
Kapka Kassabova
34 books393 followersKapka Kassabova was born and raised in Sofia, Bulgaria in the 1970s and 1980s. Her family emigrated to New Zealand just after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and she spent her late teens and twenties in New Zealand where she studied French Literature, and published two poetry collections and the Commonwealth-Writers Prize-winner for debut fiction in Asia-Pacific, Reconnaissance.
In 2004, Kapka moved to Scotland and published Street Without a Name (Portobello, 2008). It is a story of the last Communist childhood and a journey across post-communist Bulgaria. It was short-listed for the Dolman Travel Book Award.
The music memoir Twelve Minutes of Love (Portobello 2011), a tale of Argentine tango, obsession and the search for home, was short-listed for the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust Book Awards.
Villa Pacifica (Alma Books 2011), a novel with an equatorial setting, came out at the same time.
Border: a journey to the edge of Europe (2017 Granta/ Greywolf) is an exploration of Europe's remotest border region.
Her essays and articles have appeared in The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement, Vogue, The Sunday Times, The Scottish Review of Books, The NZ Listener, The New Statesman, and 1843 Magazine.
In 2004, Kapka moved to Scotland and published Street Without a Name (Portobello, 2008). It is a story of the last Communist childhood and a journey across post-communist Bulgaria. It was short-listed for the Dolman Travel Book Award.
The music memoir Twelve Minutes of Love (Portobello 2011), a tale of Argentine tango, obsession and the search for home, was short-listed for the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust Book Awards.
Villa Pacifica (Alma Books 2011), a novel with an equatorial setting, came out at the same time.
Border: a journey to the edge of Europe (2017 Granta/ Greywolf) is an exploration of Europe's remotest border region.
Her essays and articles have appeared in The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement, Vogue, The Sunday Times, The Scottish Review of Books, The NZ Listener, The New Statesman, and 1843 Magazine.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
December 8, 2019
That’s how it is: those who leave
are never remembered by unrequited lovers,
never missed by the lonely poplars in autumn.
I’ve made it to this next life,
as an exotic bird I’ve learnt to speak
this gentle language of oblivion,
of severed names.
*
Is summer enough, when you see
a forgotten, aching self in faces
struck by other, less gentle seasons?
*
it’s a sign of fluency to dream in a language,
but we dream wide-awake and in silence,
we think about our dreams
in broken sentences
*
they were two of a kind and now
they live elsewhere
from each other
or just elsewhere
they live in foreign lands,
in lush lands, in rich lands
on both sides of a forgotten country
they call there but never
by its real name, never home
never Home, they don’t know why
I’m one of them,
I am the one who called the other day
the other night
why do you call,
he said
haven’t you anything better
to do but call ghosts
in the middle of my summer?
I’m in love, and there are
a hundred thousand miles
between us
and six hundred and fifty two days
of silence
we’re not ‘there’ and never
will be again, why do you call?
I said,
I call because
I’m in the middle of winter,
and the stars here have frozen in patterns
you and I never saw ‘there’, and never will
I call because I’m not in love
unless you count ghosts,
I call because I haven’t said Home
in three years and fifty two days,
and now that I’m at it,
here is why I call
we were two of a kind, and you
are the other one, aren’t you still,
aren’t you, but whoever you are, I’ve nothing
better to do, how have you been?
*
And it’s a relief, or a small death,
to be standing, dressed in the simplicity
of night, for once not crumpled by ecstasy,
anticipation or senseless joy.
Silently, you greet the ocean, this pliant
metaphor for anything we feel at a given time.
As of tonight, you ascribe to it no meaning,
no truth, no character. But planted firmly
in its moving sands, your mere presence
is a question: is it true that everything will pass
before your dry eyes,
even this night stripped of tomorrow?
are never remembered by unrequited lovers,
never missed by the lonely poplars in autumn.
I’ve made it to this next life,
as an exotic bird I’ve learnt to speak
this gentle language of oblivion,
of severed names.
*
Is summer enough, when you see
a forgotten, aching self in faces
struck by other, less gentle seasons?
*
it’s a sign of fluency to dream in a language,
but we dream wide-awake and in silence,
we think about our dreams
in broken sentences
*
they were two of a kind and now
they live elsewhere
from each other
or just elsewhere
they live in foreign lands,
in lush lands, in rich lands
on both sides of a forgotten country
they call there but never
by its real name, never home
never Home, they don’t know why
I’m one of them,
I am the one who called the other day
the other night
why do you call,
he said
haven’t you anything better
to do but call ghosts
in the middle of my summer?
I’m in love, and there are
a hundred thousand miles
between us
and six hundred and fifty two days
of silence
we’re not ‘there’ and never
will be again, why do you call?
I said,
I call because
I’m in the middle of winter,
and the stars here have frozen in patterns
you and I never saw ‘there’, and never will
I call because I’m not in love
unless you count ghosts,
I call because I haven’t said Home
in three years and fifty two days,
and now that I’m at it,
here is why I call
we were two of a kind, and you
are the other one, aren’t you still,
aren’t you, but whoever you are, I’ve nothing
better to do, how have you been?
*
And it’s a relief, or a small death,
to be standing, dressed in the simplicity
of night, for once not crumpled by ecstasy,
anticipation or senseless joy.
Silently, you greet the ocean, this pliant
metaphor for anything we feel at a given time.
As of tonight, you ascribe to it no meaning,
no truth, no character. But planted firmly
in its moving sands, your mere presence
is a question: is it true that everything will pass
before your dry eyes,
even this night stripped of tomorrow?
December 13, 2019
Icarus
A light body with no head, I fly.
I fall, a slow body incongruously tried
to oversee the ocean.
Falling follows flying, but what does flying follow?
the dream, in which taking off is skyward falling?
I always forget which is a state of mind,
which is destiny. I forget which to forget
so that the pain of it doesn’t happen,
though hitting the sky is merely
an ambition of pain.
I forget, or worse – I never knew how to take
the stretch of blue that beckons
and doesn’t beckon, that breathes in and out,
eternal with the ignorance of its tidal memory.
How to be contained, and by what – this hidden
vastness should cause at least a splash,
at the moment of falling.
But nothing does.
One day I’ll wake up flying towards the green
wall of the ocean, rehearsing in vertiginous circles
the oceanic myth of me
that sleeps without a splash
beneath inconceivable vaults of silence
and doesn’t know, and doesn’t need to know.
A light body with no head, I fly.
I fall, a slow body incongruously tried
to oversee the ocean.
Falling follows flying, but what does flying follow?
the dream, in which taking off is skyward falling?
I always forget which is a state of mind,
which is destiny. I forget which to forget
so that the pain of it doesn’t happen,
though hitting the sky is merely
an ambition of pain.
I forget, or worse – I never knew how to take
the stretch of blue that beckons
and doesn’t beckon, that breathes in and out,
eternal with the ignorance of its tidal memory.
How to be contained, and by what – this hidden
vastness should cause at least a splash,
at the moment of falling.
But nothing does.
One day I’ll wake up flying towards the green
wall of the ocean, rehearsing in vertiginous circles
the oceanic myth of me
that sleeps without a splash
beneath inconceivable vaults of silence
and doesn’t know, and doesn’t need to know.
June 18, 2016
This eloquent collection of poetry struck a chord with me. From each page pours the hard-to-articulate feeling of the perpetual traveler, of making a home for yourself somewhere completely and gloriously and confusingly new, of being tied to more than one place, of being stretched across two or three or more worlds at once... How much the abrupt shifts in climate and weather changes how you interact with the earth... how everything is different and the same at the same time... of feeling at home in so many places and also never feeling completely rooted. This is a book I will keep with me and return to again and again.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews