#RivetingReviews: Anna Blasiak reviews THE UNEXPECTED ANSWER by Silvia Choleva

Silvia Choleva has six poetry collections under her belt, written between the mid-1990s and now. She is also the author of three plays and two books of prose fragments, as well as a collection of short stories. Her work has been translated into Greek, Serbian, Czech, Lithuanian, Turkish, French, Norwegian and now English. Apart from being a prolific writer and poet, she has also worked as a journalist, she was the editor of two influential Bulgarian literary magazines and a presenter on state-run radio. And then, in 2012, she co-founded DA Poetry Publishing.

The Unexpected Answer is her second book to be translated into English, after Journeys There and Back. Interestingly, both these translations have been published in Bulgaria, the first one by Choleva’s own press, the second by ICU Publishing. That surely is a sign of how hard it is to convince publishers from English-speaking countries, including Britain, to take on poetry written in other languages. Yes, I know, translated books tend to be expensive to produce and not always easy to sell. But then, does poetry ever sell? The fact remains that if it were not for such brave initiatives as the above-mentioned examples, we English-language readers would be on the losing side, not having access to all this richness. So, thank you, DA and ICU (as well as other brave small publishers) for taking the risk.

So now, let’s look at the poetry itself.

Choleva writes pieces that have certain quietness about them: they are distilled, stripped of anything unnecessary, anything loud, they are earnest and casual but still marked with some urgency and clarity. She has an amazing knack of focusing on small details and building a whole world out of them. This kind of striking simplicity is not easy to achieve, but she hits the mark over and over again:

it’s raining over the place
where we are not
a towel hanging
forgotten on the line
flapping
with the weight of water
and when it stops
it will drain a long while
drop by drop
the earthly body swallows
love
swallows me

You can read another example of this in last month’s Poetry Travels.

In The Unexpected Answer the poet takes us to a lot of different places, creates a kind of emotional map of experiences that for her became indicative of each place, or perhaps became the place itself:

from Spain
…
the key locks of Compostela
the pregnant cat slowly crosses the yard going one way
the stork from nearby nest flies in a circle
growing wider
going higher
but does not recede
not yet

Choleva, whilst she can be withdrawn and insightful in her poems, clearly has a lot of tenderness for human beings. There is warmth in her writing, some kind of understanding and forgiveness for all our shortcomings. I find this very refreshing, especially as so much writing today is disillusioned with human kind. And she is also no stranger to humour and I will leave you with a perfect example of that:

I thought love was possible
but it is like the smell of rain in the air
and you can tell it’s coming down somewhere
but not here

Reviewed by Anna Blasiak

THE UNEXPECTED ANSWER. NEW AND SELECTED POETRY

Written by Silvia Choleva

Translated from the Bulgarian by Elena Alexieva, Jonathan Dunne, Kaloyan Ignatovski, Marina Stefanova, Maria P. Vassileva

Published by DA Poetry Publishing (2025)

March 2025 #RivetingReviews titles are available to buy from bookshop.org.

Anna Blasiak is a poet, writer, translator and Managing Editor of the European Literature Network. Recently she has translated According to Her by Maciej Hen (shortlisted to the EBRD Literature Prize 2023) and Aneta Kamińska’s Czernowitz-Charmowitz. Her translation of Psalm to Saint Sabina by Radosław Wiśniewski won the inaugural Andrew Singer Prize for Verse at Trafika Europe. She has published two bilingual poetry and photography books with Lisa Kalloo Café by Wren’s St-James-in-the-Fields, Lunchtime (2020) and Deliverance (2024), as well as a book-length interview with a Holocaust survivor, Lili: Lili Stern-Pohlmann in conversation with Anna Blasiak.

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