Jonas ZdanysThe Angled Road: Collected Poems, 1970–2020

Abstract

Books in Review Jonas Zdanys The Angled Road: Collected Poems, 1970–2020 Beaumont, Texas. Literary Press Lamar University. 2020. 286 pages. A REMARKABLE POETRY career is packaged in this collection. Jonas Zdanys has published poetry in English for fifty years. Additionally, he has published works in Lithuanian while also serving as the foremost translator of Lithuanian works into English. Together, his literary output exceeds fifty titles. This latest collection features most of his poems published in English during the past fifty years. The titles are arranged by publication date, from the latest, Notebook Sketches, published in 2019, to the earliest, with a significant amount of writing from 1970, featured in Voice on an Anthill. Emily Dickinson’s “angled road” of experience is the touchstone for Zdanys, her lines declaring a “paradox” that surpasses intellectual abstraction to confirm the authority of art. His experience in poetry is profound and multifaceted, following a varied, bilingual academic career while demonstrating personal involvement with stylistic development. Given this, I am struck with the consistency of his tonal quality and thematic awareness, evident throughout his career. Yet no poem from his eleven volumes represented here sounds monotonous nor seems repetitive. Each poem, each line, contains its own vibrancy, its measure in time. Each poem is a living cell making up a discerning body of work. Of his several themes, the actualization of the self, situated within contexts of positive , life-affirming tension between dark and light, seems most prominent. A healthy regard for human struggle amidst looming mortality gives his work a mythic quality without being overwhelmingly fatalistic. The poetic contexts often make use of landscape and other elements and features of the natural world. His use of nature, however, is not a simplistic, misplaced reverence, nor, on the other extreme, is it a pessimistic naturalism. Zdanys balances the natural with the human as a living communion, always made aware by a confidently asserted, honest narrative voice. The poems suggest a self-awareness concomitantly linked to a worldly awareness. Appropriately, the immediacy of mortality is felt, but it is not morbid or overwhelming . His poetry consoles while challenging obvious human limitation. To achieve this, Zdanys’s use of language demonstrates control (line control may be his most significant quality) without coercion or constraint. His lyrical quality consistently resolves into an epiphanic moment that satisfies the reader and the contextual demands of the preceding lines. One example of his lyricism may be seen in JONAS ZDANYS friends from a young age but coming from very different circumstances, not socioeconomically , but because Grisu is of uncertain parentage and is something of a wild child. They smoke weed with their friends, play truant from school, and seem to be headed nowhere. And yet they develop a hardscrabble masculine morality, influenced by American culture and films. Iconic sketches of John Wayne and Alan Ladd show up in several panels, as do the names of Paul Newman and Al Pacino. American culture resonates with the boys, for they find few role models among the squabbling men of the village. Early on, the reader begins to piece together how these young men develop their sense of what it means to be a man while they engage in the timeless banter and athletic feats of youth. Always in the background, and indeed often at the very thrumming heart of this tale, is the presence of the Roma. Young Loretta, near their age, often trails the boys, but they see her as an old crazy witch. Her family, the Stancis, had been interned in camps during the war, and Reviati offers us a page with a Roma arm revealing a number . The text is simple and wrenching, “Our numbers were preceded by a Z. It stood for ‘Zigeuner.’ Gypsy.” Over the course of several pages in the middle of the narrative, we get a brief history of Hitler’s attempt to purge the Roma, made ironic by the fact that their Indian and linguistic origins may make them pure Aryans. Yet they were demonized for miscegenation and were one of the two groups, along with the Jews, persecuted for racial reasons. As Reviati writes, “There wasn’t a single region in Italy without...