The poems presented in this collection shows the development of the poet’s creative path, all the phases and innovations that she has offered Georgian audience in her exquisite, deep, elegant and emotive poetry. Lia Sturua’s selected poems cover almost all of her work, and gives a range of her varied themes and genres. She made her entry into Georgian poetry in the early 1960s, showing a mastery of free verse, which has its origins in our early hymnography, and she has become organically and inseparably a Georgian poet. But to achieve this has only become possible after great poetic persistence and undeserved criticism. Many have accused her of choosing blindly to imitate foreigners and letting her desire to appear original determine what she writes. The fundamental characteristic of her poetry is an inner monologue and a flow of associations, which is accompanied by countless lyrical moods and impulses. The structure behind all her world, however, is extraordinary metaphor, another reason why Lia Sturua has been criticised. But unlike ideological reproaches, these have been somewhat belated ‘aesthetic’ rebukes. The main virtue of Sturua’s poetry is that it is so utterly sincerely written, that even the most far-fetched metaphor is perceived by the reader to be natural. Today she is seen as a monolithic figure in Georgian literary space, and her influence on the development of Georgian poetry is now undeniable. Those poets who have set out to write vers libres in Georgian have chosen a radically different path from Sturua’s, and today her importance is widely discussed. We should note that Lia Sturua is also a great craftswoman in conventional forms. The most striking example is a cycle of sonnets, which is also included in her selected poems. The distinguishing feature of this cycle is that it faithfully keeps to the form of the classical sonnet, but aesthetically we can identify these sonnets as ‘modern sonnets’.

Otar Chiladze, Writer 

EXTRACT
Translated into English by Dalila Gogia and Tim Kercher 

SOMETIMES YOU GET USED TO A PERSON

Sometimes you get used to a person
Like you get used to a thing, or to bread, 
Or to each new day.
Sometimes, you find a person and run away
As though you fear he’s becoming 
Just like others. When you met me,
the guilt was eating me up, 
an odd sense of it,
but you saw the books inside my head,
opened one of them
and found a murdered poet.
And then, again and again,
You expressed your sympathies,
lighting me up with a dazzling day
so that my head may charm you with hair
or a pose that is best in the sun,
yet x-ray film never lies.
What you wanted was to get at the truth,
To immediately help yourself escape.
But you didn’t manage to leave, to get away...

CEZANNE

Who will paint the thrill derived from peaches?
Mr. Cezanne, who
graduated from a fine art academy,
who sleeps in the street
with his shoes under his head.
He is hungry, while at a Sotheby Auction
his peaches are being eaten.
Those who paint flesh don’t like him
nor do the art teachers:
he is rectangle with an aching side,
he paints peaches, not a fear walking
on the their bruises.
Does he have time for mystics
since he understands the truth of form?
And as soon as God sees him
Cezanne will immediately paint the thrill of peaches
to win Him over from
a painting of pink flesh...