Topogrāfiskās dzejas tēlainība Marta Pujāta dzejoļu krājumā “Dāma baltos džinsos”

The article focuses on the collection of poems by Marts Pujāts, which was published in 2023; it has also received important awards this year, including the Poetry Days Award and the Latvian Literature Award of the Year (2024). Artis Ostups, one of the book’s reviewers, admits that the poet speaks a new poetic language in the collection, which can promote a different sensitivity and understanding of beauty, a different view of Latvia and a different view of poetry. The reviewer’s statements determined the purpose of the study – through analysis and interpretation of the poems, to discover the angles of imagery of Pujāts’s new poetic language. All the poems in Pujāts’s collection of poems, except for the last one, can be called topographical poetry because each poem, as indicated in the title, is about a Latvian settlement (village, small town, city) or road (the road number has been included in the title). None of the poems in the collection is long (the shortest ones have only three lines); thus, the author discovers and celebrates the settlement by poetically representing some part of it, an element that has drawn his attention. The central component of the story of the poem, which in many cases can be perceived as a fable, a fairy tale, a legend, can be either commonly related to the place, for example, Rūjiena and its ice cream, or randomised and irrelevant, for example, cows in a meadow, a lake, a river, a bridge, a stone, ruins, a burnt house, a path, a bus stop, trees, Latvians, etc. Many poems resemble aporias, as places in the mise-en-scene of the poet’s imagination appear via enigmatic metaphors, allegories, and surprising similes. The beauty and mysterious effect of the collection is given by the “lady in white jeans” – the title image involved in many poems invoked only metaphorically, having many poetic meanings. In the collection’s final poem, the title character is revealed both as a riddle and an answer to it. Pujāts’s collection of poems “The Lady in White Jeans”, on the one hand, takes the reader out of the inner world full of problems and human relationships; on the other hand, the interpretation of each poem becomes an intellectual adventure and aesthetic pleasure. Such a trip gives a different perspective on Latvia.