St. Brigid's Well began on the West Coast of Ireland as Jonas Zdanys was teaching a seminar in Dingle, County Kerry, on writing the literature of place. It is a single lyrical narrative poem, composed in stanzas and sections, that considers place as a described location, as a foundation and springboard for metaphorical representations and explorations, and as a wide and flexible container filled with people and actions and things, all connected and all ever-changing. There is a fourth dimension of place at play in this poem as well, the dimension of time, which ultimately sculpts all three, pushing and pulling them across many horizons. The poem's focus on the Dingle Peninsula, past and present, the vistas along the Ring of Kerry, and the literal as well as metaphorical pilgrimage eastward to St. Brigid's Well in Kildare is linked to the figure of Brigid, who serves as a touchstone in that exploration both as Christian saint and as pagan goddess. It is Brigid, in both forms, who appears in these pages as a principal definer and texture of the Irish landscape as it has blossomed and changed - and as it has remained constant - in its physical dimensions and across the currents of time. This poem invites and deepens the understanding of that landscape and of how a "poetry of place" can also define the interior human landscape, encouraging us to understand and celebrate the world in which we live and ourselves in it.

St. Brigid's Well

Literature & Fiction

Zdanys, Jonas

Poetry

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In the poems and linked sequences of his thirty-fifth book, Jonas Zdanys transforms the landscapes he sees, imagines and remembers into new metaphorical configurations and image-patterns, all shaped by his sense of the pervasive and inescapable oneness of the things of the world.  Through those transformations he creates a personal landscape in these pages, a meditative place where he is able to "tie up loose ends, understand the laws/of the universe, feel the ecstasy/that radiates from the tips of the fingers."  But Zdanys does more than shape the luminous phenomena around him. His essential procedure in these poems is to reconquer the real, using unusual figurative constructs, varied forms and expressions, metaphoric eruptions, and recurring reformulated images to do so. The result is a framework of evocations, memories, mysterious suggestions, and ineffable presences that enables him to define the elemental world, that "imaginary country" ringed by flowers of salt, where "time is the only durable flesh/and lovers flow together like water."  These are engaging and complex poems, carefully chiseled personal and artistic self-evaluations that seek to unite body and spirit, along the way providing a glimpse of the infinite and ending on a note of inspiration and hope.  A bilingual, award-winning poet and translator, Zdanys serves as Chief Academic Officer for the State of Connecticut.

Salt

Virtual Artists Collective

The Thin Light of Winter collects new poems and a balanced grouping of poems selected from Zdanys' earlier books which together demonstrate his creative range, diversity, and poetic accomplishment, and which affirm his commitment to a fluent, multi-dimensional, redemptive vision of the world. An award-winning bilingual poet and translator and author of thirty-seven other books, Zdanys writes about the complexity of life and its spiritual realities through unusual figurative constructs, explorations and resonances of both narrative and lyric voices, and descriptions of the plain processes of nature and humanity in it that create a strong emotional impact. World Literature Today, which describes his work as "dense, carefully chiseled, and very original," notes that his work's "poetic quality is achieved through unusual images, masterful use of rhythmic repetition, and unformulated messages, where exposition is pared down to the bone, conveying to the penetrating language the forcefulness of Greek tragedy." This is a fine and deep book, genuine and moving, and defines the vital core of Zdanys' poetic work.

The Thin Light of Winter

The poems in this pocket companion to Zdanys' Collected Poems 1970-2020 were written between the summer of 1966 and the winter of 1969, when he was a high school student and a freshman in college. They mark the beginning of a number of continuing thematic commitments and explorations that have found differing voices, structures, and expressions over the past fifty years in his acclaimed literary work. They are a valuable and revealing look at the springboard of his poetic career.

Early Poems 1966-1969

Black Spruce Press

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.

Alternating Masks: Selected Poems of Kornelijus Platelis

Platelis, Kornelijus

'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.

Red Stones

Lamar University Press

'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.

Three White Horses: Still Lifes

Jonas Zdanys has published 49 books from 1970 to 2020. This is his 50th published book. The books include his own poetry, translations into English of Lithuanian poetry, and edited anthologies of poetry. He has spent much time in different countries, all of which have influenced his writing, and book reviewers in such divergent places as Ireland, Australia, and Luthuania have praised his poetic craftsmanship and genius as a poet.

The Angled Road Collected Poems 1970-2020

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Books by Zdanys, Jonas