Jonas Zdanys Books

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.

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.