The Last Rock Eagle by Blaga Dimitrova

Published in 1992, this slim volume is the selected poetry of the Bulgarian poet Blaga Dimitrova, translated by Brenda Walker with Vladimir Levchev and Belin Tonchev. Dimitrova's poetry is beautiful and moving, often political but subtly so, to avoid the censorship of the old communist regime. She writes about family and love and is a poet in tune with the natural world, the title of the collection refers to the poem Eagles are Vanishing, which ends:

The azure's smile has frozen
above the rocks and rocked hard.
The comparison 'like an eagle'
has lost all meaning.

She has the ability too to make political points through observations of the natural world:

And the sobbing throat of water
is stopped up with a lump of ice
(from Frost)

And the birds shall return
and with their beaks shall melt the ice into song
(from Almost Prophecy)

So this is political poetry written under oppression, but the very fact of needing to be careful of official censorship has forced the writer to avoid being overtly political so the poetry is lyrical too.

Blaga Dimitrova (1922 - 2003) one of the most popular and loved writers in Bulgaria, was vice president of her country in the first democratic government after the fall of communism.