Review by David Chorlton

LOCATING THE SOUL

 

A review of ASHES OF LIGHT, New and Selected Poems, by Lyubomir Levchev, translated by Valentin Krustev with additional translations by Jack Harte, 2006, Curbstone Press, 321 Jackson Street, Willimantic, CT 06226, http:www.curbstone.org, 124 pages, paper, $14.95. ISBN 1-931896-30-5

 

  This collection is drawn from almost half a century of writing by the Bulgarian poet born in 1935 and appears here with illustrations by Mark Gerard McKee. McKee’s drawings are an interesting gateway to the poems, depicting human figures with no hint as to the geographic location of the subjects. Levchev is a prominent writer in his homeland, belonging to the generation that followed the de-Stalinization of the 1950s and having served as Chairman of the Union of Bulgarian Writers. Reading this book offers few clues to the place in which the poems were written but a little more insight into the mindset of poets in Eastern Europe during the latter half of the twentieth century.

  It seems throughout that Levchev avoids specific references to where he is, choosing instead more universal ones. From the earliest poem in the book, GIMMEBREADYE, to the most recent, FALL, we are unlikely to find direct links to Bulgaria. The 1957 poem grows from a talk with a friend over a cigarette and the final one ends with a white wind that has blown past from Drama or Kavala, which suggest a fascination with Greek culture. THE LAND OF THE MURDERED POETS opens with: Between the Arctic Circle/and the Tropic of Cancer, again fixing a broader than local point. When a specific spot is mentioned, one obviously personal, as in WE STOPPED, it is presented this way:

 

We stopped.

Right under

the sign

“No stopping!”

and then you said to me;

“This is my favorite spot…”

 

  In 1994, following the end of the Iron Curtain, Levchev wrote a poem with a set location, I WHO DID NOT FLEE POMPEII. We begin reading with history in mind, but the line, The corrupt city has become a museum, seems to address his home in the guise of the Pompeii, giving the reader a reference with obvious connotations more likely to offer the full impact of the situation he is describing. By 2001, an interesting twist on he theme of place comes in THE LAST CAPRICE, where the author sets out leading his dead father by the hand without knowing where to take him, and we encounter the fact that The Internet Café/is closed for prophylaxis. Here is the world turned into a dream with the internet café as our common locale.

  Levchev’s imagery has the simple force of things we know regardless of nationality: a gas station, bread, clocks, a wall, the coast. When he writes about a lighthouse in the poem of that title, it is less to describe the lighthouse at Garoube and more to argue that The human soul boils with love and peril. His breadth of vision is a challenge, especially to those of us who do not remember what it was like to live in Stalin’s shadow. Intellectual survival for Levchev meant staying in touch with the world’s history in order to make sense of his own circumstances. To finish with lines that summarize much of what is in these pages, I offer this from CAPRICE NO.4:

 

Happiness,

they say,

is the slaughterhouse of poets.

But it’s not I who said it.

Happiness,

they say,

real happiness,

is scattered throughout our lives

as life perhaps is scattered

throughout the universe.