In Kaishauri’s poems the main problem is women’s routine. Her heroine describes a woman’s activity: washing clothes, cleaning, cooking: she describes it in an aggressive way, but this attitude to everything has two sides to it, and the aggression periodically endows Kaishauri’s poems with positive energy. Routine is transformed emotionally and ideologically. Kaishauri’s poems have a world which becomes magical. Her poetry is characterized by an unexpected images. She often uses simple rhythms, but her precise, sharp tone, together with this simplicity, results in new poetic language formation. What we are seeing is a conflict between the real and the unreal, between the comic and the tragic subtext, between Utopia and naturalism. From the point of view of depth, this book sets out one of the most pondered and considered problems of womanhood. She tries to look at the relationship from two different angles and in both cases she presents an extreme and ruthless picture. This two-sided aggression – of mother towards child, and of child towards mother – is shocking and paradoxical, but it is easily understood. We can say quite freely that this poetic interpretation of everyday objects is, in general, what happens when the everyday is refracted in a poetic prism, something we see in Rusudan Kaishauri’s poems, and which is very rare in the work of Georgian poets. From the concrete Kaishauri moves to the general, from personal experience to empirical truth, instead of the other way round, as is usual in poetry.

‘She has created a totally new sector, her own niche in Georgian poetry, by portraying the image of a woman triumphing over the everyday.’   

Mariam Tsiklauri, poet

‘For a woman to have five children, and to be a single mother as well, widowed at an early age, and living in this country, which is designed so that many a living creature can disappear without trace, is something that really never occurred to me…’   

Naira Gelashvili, writer, critic

‘The path from pack-animal to noble steed sometimes passes through the kitchen. The main thing is who is busy in the kitchen, because the usual crockery, spoons, forks, knives and plates can bang about with the most divine music: someone tormented in everyday life may start speaking the language of truth and tell us countless things about women who are actually completely peculiar, even though at first sight ordinary. Rusudan Kaishauri is just such a woman and just such a poet.’   

Giorgi Lobzhanidze, poet, critic

 

EXTRACT
Translated into English by Natalia Bukia-Peters and Victoria Field

WOMAN AS A TABLE  

That was time when the woman was
a writing table.
She bustled about with knives next to the stove.
When she used the clothes line
to tie up the wind,
she wrung out the dreams cherished by the family.
She kept her children sitting in all the drawers,
she wound up her heart using a key.
She was so tired
that she stayed up all night writing poems.
This woman once
Bent her back,
remained like that and never took of flying.
The brazen chair held itself out for her without even enquiring
whether this was actually a woman or a table.

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