An Abstract Prayer is Lela Samniashvili’s fifth collection of poetry. In all five collections, which cover her creative work over more than fifteen years, it can be said that the author has never ever deviated from her basic path. Poetic frivolity or laxness is not her custom. She is always severe and skilled. We will find only precise and true metaphors in her work, you won’t come across last-minute improvised images and phrases. You can never mistake her voice for anyone else’s. Lela Samniashvili can be very sharp and very refined, her poems often take a well-defined position, and quite often deal with social and political topics of our times. Sometimes she can almost be too cold: she doesn’t lay herself bare, as other poets do, her images are new, we don’t find clichés, and she only uses a cliché in order to deconstruct it. In some poems Lela seems to have placed a delayed-action bomb, and she quietly and convincingly arranges for it to explode. The structure and graphics of her poems are peculiar. Tiny little bridges of dashes might remind you of Dickinson or Tsvetaeva. The formal side of the poems is another matter: sounds, musicality, rhythm. Lela very often chooses a difficult path, walking a tight-rope so as to avoid banalities in rhythm and rhyme. In a word, Lela Samniashvili is an author in filigree, even though the filigree nature is rather rare at first. But she still has a a tendency to formalism, the poems of this collection remain natural throughout but obviously, at times what each one of them has to say is set out at a conceptual level. The book consists largely of conventional poems, there are just two or three poems in blank verse, and there is something intermediate, when the convention dies out in mid-poem and then reappears, only to disappear again… The stanza forms are often very skilled, ever-changing, the rhymes are basically ones of assonance or consonance, and quite frequently are barely noticeable, alliterations appearing here and there like mirages, but none of this creates the impression of artificial device. There is a high degree of concentration everywhere: the poet’s syntax doesn’t allow a single superfluous word in the text and extracts the meaning to the last drop.

‘Lela Samniashvili’s poems are an international poetic language, a sort of poetic Esperanto, in which we are able to speak the poetry of absolutely every country, and understand from start to finish what we’re saying.’   

D. Anpimiadi, poet

EXTRACT
Translated into English by the author  

ON THE LAST PHOTO 

On the last photo I look like my mom.
Of course, she is still twenty years older than me,
But there is certain age at which a child imprints the face of a dear one
And no matter how many years are added or taken from it –
Even in the deeper past, the older recollections,
This image covers all sorts of variations of eye-shades and lines of wrinkles.

Mother, now I am similar to you
And will be like this in all kinds of futures,
Because there is in front of me the whole view, which my eye could reach
And whatever effort it may take now in examining it from all the sides,
Using microscopes or telescopes,
Sitting in the aircrafts of the highest speed,
All feelings and amazements will be the copies of the copies.

I multiply these feelings very fast,
Already almost automatically; the neurons are imprinting them
And cleaning, cleaning from the ships in fire,
From wars, from murders
And what remains is still one big confusion –
for the world in front of our noses, which we cannot touch.

Mom, it is something like your fuss in a house –
Routine filled up with strange love.
In whatever way displaced,
The objects find their place.
How boring did it use to seem.

This year even the see gave indifferent look.
As if there was no pebble unknown to me inside it
And the only way it got alive
was through the square of a hotel window.
At night the sea sang within the wooden frame in a sweetest voice
And it was not needed to look at it at all.

Maybe the truth is this –
One should not fix one’s eyes on herself from every side.
Maybe I am covering the main view myself.
Still, I am doing the same.
Mother, now I am similar to you
And will stay like this through the future of my child.



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