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Title: Poetry that is spare, sharp, and unfailingly wise.
Review: "Dreams are commercials, too./But we don't know what they are pleading for." Vladimir Levchev, a renowned poet, novelist and editor in his native Bulgaria, proves his mastery of his adopted language in "Heavenly Balkans," an uncommonly astute and striking chapbook of poems. As an Eastern European poet, Levchev had to learn much more quickly about the reality of history and politics than American poets do, and he demonstrates this in such poems as "The Balkan Dance": "We are dancing towards a new millennium/and all we can see in our future/is our past." But he also writes perceptively of America in such poems as "Washington, D.C.," in which he observes that "Freedom has countless swaying faces," and in "No Man is an Island," observing that "We all live in Manhattan" in the aftermath of 9/11. This is a small book--only 40 pages--but the poetry in it is big.
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