Normally, poets achieve what is called their personal poetic voice, their individual style by a long period of work, by trying out a variety of paths and devices. But in the case of Shota Iatashvili, everything happened very differently: from the very start of his creative path, at the beginning of the 1990s, he sensed and decided on the image, the model of his poetry for which he should strive in the years that followed. As time passed he would return to this model and in the intervals he searches for paths that will lead to it, various different, sometimes mutually exclusive paths, for every time he has to meet demands from different sides. Shota Iatashvili manages to write about everything: about money, an electrical plug, a cigarette-lighter, a blood-pressure machine, clothes, tinned sea cabbage, a bus seen from his balcony… It doesn’t matter what he gets into his head, what he finds to say, what he passes off on us, what he notices. Or, in fact, what he can’t make out: he doesn’t conceal things, when the poem happens to be about what he couldn’t explain or recognise and what gets into the tissue, what he is involved in. This is what is most characteristic of his texts: admitting that poetry is like an arena for confession and profession. But poets, as a rule, call things by their proper name, often their tone is quite categorical and decisive. In Shota Iatashvili’s work, however, this ‘rule’ seems to be breached. He will often simply tell you something, then take back what he has said, retrieve the question and leave you wondering. Shota Iatashvili’s poems are characterised by a narrative style of humour and always saturated with a paradoxical way of looking at things.

‘His latest collection is like an ordinary, and at the same time an extraordinary diary, which, because of its many themes, can be of interest to everyone – from a ‘Neanderthal’ who is furious with poetry, to a poetry gourmet.’   

L. Kodalashvili, literary critic

‘For me, Shota is wandering poetry. If you were to ask what sort of poetry it is, I’d say it’s, you know, Iatashviliian. Do you know what it reminds me of? Gauguin’s [does she mean Van Gogh’s? D.R.] sunflowers, which seem to be swaying. That’s what his poetry is to me. Every joint and every bone of his is elegant, as if made of rubber. Do you know what his poetry is like? He seems to be sitting among friends and chatting to them, or he’s sitting quite alone and talking. That’s what his poems are.’   

R. Kaishauri, poet

EXTRACT
Translated into English by Tim Ketcher          

ON HOW A CITY GETS PUBLISHED EACH DAY

They start working at dawn, the proofreaders and city stylists.
They mow the lawns,
paint the facades of buildings,
reconnect broken cables,
read the streets line by line
like professionals:
this dog should not be here, let’s take it off;
let’s add a newsstand between these two trees,
and down there, at the end of the street
a trash can should be placed but
let’s change the street name.
Right there we need to correlate a supermarket with its original text –
citations from American life,
those the city just recently approved.
Frankly, many tasks wait to be done,
but not out of weakness.
Every morning there’s a steady diligence;
they stick their noses in the dusty volumes and
do their never-ending jobs:
replace the street tiles,
re-paint billboards in accordance with each holiday,
hang the street signs
and, finally, bring this stylistically corrected
city to the Night Editor for publishing.


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