Anima
A Wild Pastoral
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
‘A classic for our times’ MONIQUE ROFFEY
‘Haunting, beautiful… Anima will live with me for a long time’ CAL FLYN
'A book that mesmerises with its sense of adventure and epic sweep, this is creative non-fiction at its best' GUARDIAN
Over the course of one summer, Kapka Kassabova lives with perhaps the last true pastoralists in Europe.
She joins the epic seasonal movement of vast herds of sheep, along with shepherds and dogs, to find pasture in the mountains. As she becomes attuned to the sacrifices inherent in this isolated existence, Kassabova finds herself drawn deeper into the tangled relationships at the heart of this small community.
Anima is a spellbinding portrayal of the human–animal interdependence in pastoral life, and a plea for a different way of living – one where we might all begin to heal our broken relationship with the natural world.
‘An extraordinary work of exploration, both inner and outer. It should be required reading for everyone thinking about our human environment: which is to say, all of us’ THE TABLET
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Poet Kassabova (Elixir) concludes her Balkan quartet with this vivid account of the months she spent with the Karakachan people near Bulgaria's Pirin Mountains. Describing her subjects' day-to-day lives, Kassabova recounts accompanying shepherds as they struggled to milk uncooperative goats and to corral sheep flocks as they traveled to grazing grounds. "Everything felt difficult," she writes, recalling how incessant barking from dogs tasked with protecting livestock often made sleep impossible and how arduous it was to prepare food in huts that sometimes lacked electricity or plumbing. Though Karakachans were forced to give up their nomadic way of life amid increased policing of national borders during the Cold War, Kassabova suggests that their close relationship with the land can still be seen in such customs as burying dead shepherds under rocks that eventually "mossed and blended with the landscape." Noting existential threats to the Karakachans' way of life, she explains how their indigenous semidomesticated sheep have a hard time competing in commercial markets with breeds genetically engineered to produce more milk. Kassabova's lyrical sensibility will transport readers, as when she remarks on the various forests she passed through: "Pine is rational and streamlined in its Gothic architecture," while "oak is musical, the leaves trill and light passes through it like waves." This pensive travelogue captures the rigors and attractions of a vanishing way of life.
