Anima: A Wild Pastoral

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. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, Wylie Agency. (Aug.)