Maia Sarishvili’s poetry collection Microscope is a compilation of around 60 poems which cannot be sorted into periods or thematic cycles, because all the poems are bonded by one common emotion and united into one poetic fabric. Maia Sarishvili writes short, evocative verses that cover everything in one breath. The author deals with everyday subjects by referring to concrete objects and actions, and thus her poetry seems like a catalogue of the madness of everyday life, observed through a microscope. The main leitmotif of the collection can be said to be the phenomenon of children – an eternal curse and blessing. Often, the protagonist is presented as a mother and a child simultaneously, namely a woman who is still surrounded by her own childhood reflections and has to deal with the responsibility of motherhood and at that same time the symbol of a child turns into a punishment and an unbearable burden. Maia Sarishvili brilliantly manages to overturn traditionally established concept of motherhood, and suggests some poetic inversion. Generally, such harsh sensitive reflections are unfamiliar to Georgian poetry and it is very significant that female author manages to revolt against those traditional stereotypes and demolish them with her unique literary sense and voice. Maia Sarishvili’s work is suffused with images that, because of their directness, physicality and psychological force, have introduced a new sound into Georgian poetry.

‘Her poems are like Rilke’s Duino Elegies. Somehow self-sufficient, and somehow something is always happening inside them. Whenever I touch them, whenever I read them over and over again, something else is happening inside me each time. Her poems are naked, containing so much naked feeling and sense, but on the other hand, so much intelligence.’    

Z. Ratiani, poet

‘In her depiction of every event, object and action Maia Sarishvili wraps reality into a linguistic membrane. Her poetic world gives the means to stop and think. For Maia Sarishvili reality, outside the bounds of poetry, would be like a path on which life would fly past at an unimaginable speed. By means of poetry, however, the poet subdues reality in her verses. This blazes a trail through the tensions of everyday life and chaos.’

 I. Degraeve, translator

  

EXTRACT
Translated into English by Timothy Kercher and Nene Giorgadze

NOW, THE STORM HAS ARRANGED THE INSANE



Now, the storm has arranged the insane,

set down a different order.

Those at the end are children, like rhymes.

A lunatic poem started as a protest.

My smile is thrown down
like a wounded wing – clumsy me –

I can’t lift it, can’t grip it.

A crowd tramples my lips –

it gets worse in the throng’s midst.

I look up – drops like mini-megaphones.

I chase them down and to each one, read my poems.

It’s odd. Not a single drop lingers with me.

And I remember the sticky stage
in a packed-out house where, once upon a time as a child,
I foolishly rose when my mother was dying

and clumsily climbed up on the table

to make God better hear my prayers…


THE CRUEL RESPONSE 

You told me that
I should have slain
at least two of these four children,
but I couldn’t choose which ones…
And meanwhile, they’ve grown up.
They can protect themselves now.
You can no longer kill them easily.
If I had only one,
I would have kissed her four times
and nobody would have told her
of those who died for the other three kisses.
I behaved unwisely,
couldn’t dig out my children
with a sterile hoe, like digging out tonsils,
and now I have to apologize…
I’ve always thought that if I do what you say,
my belly would grow regardless
and through my entire life,
I would carry as many foothills
as children—I would have aborted those in my body
and then these hills would be graves—
more terrifying, eternal.
You told me that
I should have butchered
at least two of these four children,
but I couldn’t choose which ones,
and meanwhile, they grow up,
lay their fingers upon my cheeks
and start speaking…


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