The book has a Svan title. Mizhlahar means the place where the sun sets, which in the mountains changes almost every week. This alternation can be taken by us to be a metaphor of Meshveliani’s poetry. His poetry is a change of view, from the visible towards the invisible. From what is native to what is distant, and back again. Psychological and territorial emigration seem to merge in this book. In his poems objects and phenomena that are unrelated to one another become twinned. A polyphonic melodiousness of the lexical entities which he derives from various cultural and linguistic layers creates a special tone for his texts. SosoMeshveliani is equally adept at conventional and free forms of verse, and hits on and uses appropriate forms to depict his viewpoint and the time of changes. The lyrical hero of his poems is someone alienated or, to be more precise, set apart from the community, and his problem is having a mental ethnic minority, which makes solitude all the more unbearable than any other sort of ethnic minority, which one way or another at least allows you to identify you with a group of a kind and achieve self-realisation. On the other hand, SosoMeshveliani has no desire to inflict helplessness or homelessness on his reader, there is the challenge of the experience of alienation, and everywhere he sees and brings out beauty; he knows the value of silence, he tries to show us an archetypical world which momentarily appears, if only seldom, to a person’s consciousness before disappearing again.

‘Soso Meshveliani values above all very raw feelings. He has a relaxed communion with nature which at times takes on such an earthly and tangible form that it almost leaves you with the feeling of a sexual act involving the whole world, or, more exactly, the world’s sexual thrall.’   

Giorgi Lobzhanidze, poet, literary critic

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