Anima
A Wild Pastoral
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
In Anima, Kapka Kassabova introduces us to the “pastiri” people—the shepherds struggling to hold on to an ancient way of life in which humans and animals exist in profound interdependence. Following her three previous books set in the Balkans, and with an increasinging interest in the degraded state of our planet and culture, Kassabova reaches further into the spirit of place than she ever has before. In this extraordinary portrayal of pastoral life, she investigates the heroic efforts to sustain the oldest surviving breeds of our domesticated animals, and she shows us the epic, orchestrated activity of transhumance—the seasonal movement, on foot, of a vast herd of sheep, working in tandem with dogs. She also becomes more and more attuned to the isolation and sacrifices inherent in the lives shaped by this work.
Weaving together lyrical writing about place with a sweeping sense of the traumatic histories that have shaped this mountainous region of Bulgaria, Kassabova shows how environmental change and industrial capitalism are endangering older, sustainable ways of living, and by extension she reveals the limited nature of so much of modern life. But shining through Kassabova’s passionate, intimate response to the monoculture that is “Anthropos” is her indelible portrait of a circulating interdependence of people and animals that might point to a healthier way to live.
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.
