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Tom Phillips is a UK-born writer, translator and lecturer living in Bulgaria where he teaches creative writing and translation at Sofia University St Kliment Ohridski. His recent and imminent publications include Self-Portrait with Tobacco Moustache (DA Poeziya, Sofia, 2026), A Moment Short of Perfection – translations of the selected poems of Kristin Dimitrova (White Pine Press, USA, 2026) and Once There Was Spring – the translated poems and prose poems of Geo Milev (Worple Press, UK, 2025). His own poems have also been published in Nepozhati Prevodi/Unknown Translations (Scalino, Sofia, 2016), Recreation Ground (Two Rivers Press, 2012) and Burning Omaha (Firewater, 2003).
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Introduction
Kvartal is a Bulgarian word meaning ‘neighbourhood’, but it’s also been adopted by the little grid of streets in central Sofia we live in, even though said often, cobbled and linden-lined streets are technically part of the much larger neighbourhood of Oborishte. Aside from a few brief forays beyond the quadrilateral of multi-lane boulevards that form the boundaries of this sub-neighbourhood (most notably to the North Macedonian town of Strumitsa in the poem beginning ‘Two peacocks flaunt’, a town which I happened to visit at the time), it’s a sequence rooted in our immediate vicinity. It’s brimming – perhaps over-brimming – with realia (the names of streets, pubs, landmarks and so on) and autobiographical episodes (returning from a gallery having bought a portrait of Bulgarian actress Nevena Kokanova, doing battle with a stubborn house centipede, meeting a friend off the train from Istanbul etc).
To date, Kvartal has only been published in Bulgarian in a translation by the Bulgarian poet and novelist Kristin Dimitrova – once in Literaturen Vestnik (the national literary newspaper) and again in Avtoportret s tyutyunevi mystatsi (Self-portrait with Tobacco Moustache), a collection – published this year by DA Poeziya – of my own poems written in Bulgarian and translations of those written in English while I’ve been here by Kristin, Petar Tchouhov and Ivan Hristov.
I can but hope that that doesn’t mean Kvartal appeals only as a curiosity – an English resident’s view of a part of the Bulgarian capital that most foreign visitors treat as a convenient location for cheap Air B’n’B weekend breaks – because, to my mind at least, the local and the specific are where poetry comes from. If grand themes emerge – well, that’s all to the good, but if it’s a choice between writing a poem about theoretical concepts, restrictive assertions of identity, existential crises or the geopolitical order, and one that begins with our neighbour’s aging dog chomping down on a slice of pizza, there are no prizes for guessing which I’d go for.
To write about the situations and experiences I’ve encountered in Bulgaria in different languages and in different poems – some in English, some in Bulgarian – has been odd, but perhaps a necessary part of attempting to see things from all angles. Or at least from more angles than one. Written in English, Kvartal seems more firmly rooted in the mundane than the Bulgarian poems I’ve written, but I suspect that’s down to my comparative knowledge and ignorance of the languages involved.
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Tom Phillips: A Sequence
KVARTAL
1
Sycamore spindles rotate
through late-summer quiet.
A tabby plays sphinx on
a wall that matches its fur.
There’s not much afoot,
though Betty trots home
with a slice of pizza
flapping from her mouth.
Outside the locked gate’s
a stack of scratched shelves:
a neighbour’s picked them up
from the neighbourhood bin.
Betty drops her found lunch
and sprawls out, panting.
2
Dondukov crosses Levski
by the Royal Stables
that caught fire last spring,
and it takes time to learn
the traffic light sequence.
Missing my chance again
I’m waiting on the corner
by the Danish consulate
with a painting under my arm.
It’s of Nevena Kokanova
when she appeared in Tobacco.
She’s wearing a white hat
and her eyes are fierce,
but distracted – as they were
in that famous role.
The portrait’s wrapped
in cellophane but a woman
across Dondukov smiles.
Perhaps a foreigner
carrying the painting of
a Bulgarian film star
in a white hat
is the strangest thing
she’ll see all day.
3
‘There are a lot of dogs,’
Katya said of those poems.
Yes, but birds as well.
There would be more bats,
but this year they’ve been
too few, too far between.
So now here’s
the turquoise dragonfly
from South Park
(where we thought
mating frogs were
a chorus of ducks),
the large orange slug
from Borisova,
the early butterflies
behind the Royal Palace
and a lizard splayed
on a Sozopol wall.
For the most part, though,
I’m sticking with Chumerna,
its birds and dogs –
although perhaps not
that spiny centipede
on our bathroom door
that clung on, clung on,
refusing to budge.
4
All the way back from Serdika
we saw just three cars,
a couple of pedestrians.
Not everyone can have gone
to the Tsaravets light show
for Reunification Day.
Solitary voices struggle
to make themselves heard.
There’s almost enough light
to read by, but I need the lamp:
Boris Hristov’s The Father of the Egg
makes Roussel’s Impressions of Africa
look like documentary.
5
What might be important
is this turn I’m taking
around the block or how
the last of summer looks
across a gilded dome
from Ulitsa August 11.
I’ve not been much further
than Zaimov to eat salad
at the wooden pub
called The Wooden Pub.
Shield bugs and a breeze
mark an end to the zhega –
although autumn is starting
slowly and the sun glow
striping the side road
stays out as late as
back-to-school kids
outside the empty art shop.
They knew a thing or two,
who painted apartments
ochre and pink.
6
It being Sunday I’m reading how
there’s been another floriation
in the history of poetic floriations
and fretting at perception’s ambivalence.
Unintentional reconsiderations –
although I’d be hard-pressed to say if
describing the grey, mass-produced fabric
on airline seats could lack an opinion.
Which is somewhere near the nub.
Being here, seeing myself here,
being seen to be here might be
matters of opinion equally.
Or they are when I think of them –
which isn’t always, I might add.
7
All things considered
all things
may be considered –
maybe a single
browned cactus stalk,
ground cinnamon shoaled
on the windowsill
(deterrent to ants)
or the face of the man
who’s parked his car,
looked up and seen me
writing on this balcony
and just about to mention him.
8
A magpie swoops to the roof,
swipes it tail across
a fraction of sky.
It’s not semaphore –
more staking a claim.
A necklace of pigeons swing
between this house and the next.
They’re keeping out of it
until a flare of light
sends them, squabbling,
into phosphorescent air.
9
Two peacocks flaunt
on a flat extension roof
while customers under an awning
are entirely diverted by
the allegorical potential
of a doe-eyed chocolate labrador.
I have no idea why this
should keep happening.
The next day we’re stood
at a monument’s epicentre,
reading poems to granite figures.
There’s a Noel Coward bravado
about our Sunday walk
towards the noonday sun
and fretted art deco
flourishes of a Kino Balkan.
All that remains is to pass
through an alley of bars
where empties lean
on each other much as
their temporary owners
must have done last night.
That – and one final try
to photograph a peacock.
10
This morning the tunnel
under Centralna Gara
is empty at 8.30am.
Then it fills briefly
with people from Pernik
commuting for work.
For an hour there are no
arrivals, no departures.
On platform 11,
I sit watching shadows
moving over pavings
and down the striped
power station chimneys.
A diesel shrieks
while it’s coupled
to graffiti’d carriages.
This summer’s tag,
Bie was here, is here
as are ballooning cartoons
from the New York subway.
Time may well be all we have,
but I don’t have it on me.
Minutes extinguish themselves
on the announcement board.
A poem half-starts itself
among metal seats,
the overgrown tracks,
until the 9.35 from Istanbul
rolls in at precisely 9.35.
11
At an average elevation of 550m,
there’s never been so much interest
in the orange house whose yard
the earnest music teacher kept clear
of leaves and imploded figs.
Not that I might be trusted to know
what’s going on. It’s a day
for accepting deliveries
and everyone wants to take
a picture of something outside
my peripheral vision.
Time does its best impression
of standing still – just as it did
all those years back on Sundays
when, home from the pub,
my parents napped
by a subsiding log fire.
12
Swift shrieks give way
to high-pitched caws
from carrion crows.
Their murder will out –
but not today, when there’s
only just enough warmth
in sunlight reflected
off a neighbour’s window.
And it’s not so much,
the passing of the seasons:
no jays scuffle in the fig tree
as they did two autumns ago.
13
You could misread this old man’s face as a test.
As an almost precise representation of all
you’d assume has gone wrong in
seventy years of history. Each
furrow could answer for a decade.
Except it’s just him waiting at the lights
and an orange tram cutting down
his rush-hour attempt to cross Botev
and, on the far side, a woman in a tracksuit
is holding up a baby to the summer light.
14
It happens. And of course the bin
has a rickety look while we queue
at the tipped-up pavement edge.
Not that anyone’s going to miss
their bus from the stop outside
the store selling secondhand clothes.
Everyone leaving Sofia
ducks out of slip roads
and into Slivnitsa tunnel.
Except that clouds do lift
and there’s something to
these aircraft arriving endlessly.
Which is where we came in
to not dissimilar weather
and our slate-floored kruchma –
the kruchma on the corner
where Chumerna swerves left,
seeming to narrow, disappear
through plaster walls and window grilles,
and the rest of the city from here’s
laid out only how we imagine it
only how we recall it from maps.
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The High Window 