Jonas Zdanys Knihy

'Three White Horses, ' the forty-eighth book by Jonas Zdanys, is a lyrical-narrative sequence of poems that uses the commitments of lyric poetry to tell a story that unfolds in a closed room in an unnamed city on one snowy night in late November. The poems present pinpoints of experience, internal and external geographies, collectively framed between midnight and dawn, and use elegiac and meditative language to consider deeply human yearnings for meaning and transcendence in a liminal world. The book is enriched by twenty-six new inkbrush paintings by Sou Vai Keng, an artist from Macau, whose abstract paintings are parallel explorations of ideas considered in the poems. Together, poems and paintings create an evocative and powerful artistic whole, a new and original look at the interstices in the search for permanence in an impermanent world. This is Zdanys' finest work to date. It is a mature and resonant poetic vision.

This latest book by Jonas Zdanys presents lyrical narrative poems that speak through vivid multi-sensual imagery and the textured language of a master poet to present a resonant interplay of poetry and painting. Written in the galleries of the New Britain Museum of American Art, the poems in this volume are not just commentaries on the framed works in those galleries. They are, most essentially, expressions of the poet's commitment to hear and to extend the stories those paintings tell, and to do so by creating parallel texts in these pages -- paintings in words that absorb and expand the paintings in pigments. This book is a masterful example of ekphrasis at its best -- a mature aesthetic vision, a chronicle of what the poet has seen and imagined at the Museum, presented through varied perspectives and voices.

'Red Stones' is a collection of poems by internationally-known poet Jonas Zdanys. In this book you will find Zdanys' best writing yet, 12-line lyric poems that speak clearly through vivid multi-sensual imagery and the textured language of a master poet. Working with the poet in producing this book is artist Steven Schroeder, who presents brilliant as well as subtle color in paintings that sometimes fall between the abstract and the literal and offer both beauty and something to ponder. Added to the collaborative art of poet and painter is the book itself, designed by Regina Schroeder, so this small volume is an aesthetic masterpiece, one you will enjoy holding, reading, rereading, examining the paintings in various light, and appreciating the interplay of three artforms: poetry, painting, and book design.

This is the comprehensive translation into English of poems by Kornelijus Platelis, the most acclaimed contemporary Lithuanian poet and one of the most accomplished of contemporary European poets. The translations in this collection are by award-winning poet and translator Jonas Zdanys. They are the product of a thirty-five year friendship and literary collaboration that celebrates lyric moments of beauty and transcendence that can shine through two languages. Vivid and original, intense and resonant, these poems affirm for us all the insights that the literary imagination makes possible into human complexity, and they attest to the luminous role of art in shaping and defining the self as it seeks to affirm its place in an inconstant world. This is an important and essential book in world literature.

Notebook Sketches presents poems from Jonas Zdanys' blue notebook, his daily companion and record of his exploration of the many tangential voices and characters he heard and imagined while writing the poems of St. Brigid's Well and Three White Horses. In many ways, this is the third book in what might be considered a triptych of his considerations of time and place, of personal as well as cultural landscapes, that speak to the fundamental truths found in the random particulars and static moments of the world. What is essential in this book, and in all three volumes, is the fact that there may be something happening before and after the moment of epiphany described in each of these sketches, but that is not presented and is not necessary. The presented moment itself is enough. The poems appear in the order in which they appear in the notebook. They were written with no organizing focus in hand and should be read individually as such, beginning on any open page and with no effort to generate connection or narrative thread, though either or both might be incidentally present. Three of Zdanys' drawings, randomly made in the notebook as parallel explorations of these ideas and not illustrating any of the poems, are also included.