The Angled Road:
Collected Poems, 1970-2020

Review by Wally Swist

To Be Both Body and Spirit

Towards the end of his watershed book, The Angled Road: Collected Poems, 1970-2020, Jonas Zdanys writes in the poem, “Love,” that “Our lives” are “a vigil/ for something whiter/ than snow,” which represents Zdanys as a reverential poet, one whose reverence is that of the harmony of the intellect and the heart (as in the compassion exhibited in the fourth chakra).  These lines also portray his penchant for an economical poetry, and may be evidence of his having studied with the late Robert Creeley who was master of the tightness of phrase while still instilling an active and poignant lyricism in his poetry.  However much may be due to Creeley’s influence, Zdanys is not only a poet of significance but is largely his own poet.  What he follows the lines quoted above is solely his own creation and why that is important is because Zdanys writes memorable verse: “Now, words are dry,/ like seagull footprints/ in the sand,/ sweepings, dust.// Bitter you say,/ the world’s beginning./ You laugh when I say/ how beautiful it was.”

Zdanys’ Collected Poems is his fiftieth book and gathers fifty years of his poetry.  That level of a poetic canon includes his many translations from his native Lithuanian many of which are considered contemporary classics for their singular achievement of the mastery of translations alone, such as Five Lithuanian Women Poets (Vilnius: Vaga Publishers Ltd., 2002), which has earned him recognition and respect internationally.  However much Zdanys will be remembered as a translator, he will be remembered so only because of his aesthetic and intellectual abilities as an American poet.  It is observed that Zdanys’ approach of implementing “a modern, multidimensional chaotic consciousness” with regard to his translations of Lithuanian language poetry is also concomitant with his “reinforce[ing] a conservative humanistic agenda”— and that is quite a juxtaposition of literary description.  What this is indicative of is that this enjambment of “multidimensional consciousness” and a “conservative humanistic agenda” may be an apt overall description of what forces are operative in the alchemy of Zdanys’ marriage of intellect and lyricism in his own poetry.

Zdanys is a practiced gardener in the fields of literature for more than a half century.  He writes in “October Garden” that “Like all gardeners, I am bound to the patch/ of dirt I cultivate and to the seeds I plant,/ each a universe of labor and each/ a point in the tally of the passing days.”  The rhythm in these lines is both harmonic in its lyricism and sonic in its metaphysical exegesis of our circadian ontological existence itself.  What is ostensible here is that Zdanys is a poet of ideas, and is a cerebral poet, but nearly magically he is able to craft such perennial philosophy into the interplay of song—and to do so in such an unobtrusive manner that we as readers are deceived by his light and sure touch.  Zdanys continues in such a manner in this poem in such a way and mesmerizes us without our barely noticing it:

Time bears everything onward and forward

in its flow and there is in fact now

little left to do, only to gather stray leaves

from time to time and turn them over

into the earth, listen to the silence

that drops across the garden when the wind

in the trees unexpectedly stops,

record the changes of the  moon.

It is possible in this way to be both

body and spirit, to know that there will be

another summer in which to try again,

another time to be sure the seed does not die out.

“To be both/ body and spirit” is essential Jonas Zdanys.  His “October Garden” is not just a paean to the finality of the autumn season but also at the same time a realization of the resurrection within us and quite significantly of the matrix of our being “body” and “spirit,” which as subtle as this might seem is what a true awakening is.

Undoubtedly, there is mysterium tremendum present in this poem, but that is presented in a way that is as light as a feather—and that is what mesmerizes us as readers.  Zdanys as poetic metaphysician displays his own arcs and angles, in his Angled Road, through the craft of the poem, which can be likened to a cosmic compass of his own creative invention.  Although Zdanys doesn’t mention or directly allude to any names, what he is inculcating in this matrix of “body” and “spirit” is essential “Christness” or inherent Buddhism, indeed, any activated intrinsic spirituality that defies definition due to its abandonment of any rhetorical device except for the very images in the poem itself and the transparency of the lyricism that carries those images, which then leaves us as we are, momentarily enlightened, in the lines of Zdanys’ “October Garden.”

Another example of Zdanys’ reverence for what is poetically refined and through that refinement his predilection for not so much framing the metaphysical in his poems but in releasing it through the lyricism of them is found in third section of his poem, “Bones:”

When I touch you, stars fall,

gather together dry and dead in your hair.

When you touch me, clouds

lift and tremble, burst into seed and flame.

Yesterday is a scattering of broken twigs

near the fence of an old house.

Today is a ragged sigh of a soul

measuring its loses in a burling wind.

Tomorrow is desire, heavy with sorrow,

a bone with wings brittle at both ends.

Such a poem summons the work of Czech poet and immunologist Miroslav Holub who often made use of his medical knowledge to affect his poetry but, again, Zdanys has a conception of the world stage with regard to literary achievement and he makes a viable statement in this poem for his standing among the best in treading the boards along that platform and dais.  Besides, how many poets would use the verb “burling” in such a way and with such utter confidence?  Who else but perhaps the surrealist French poet Andre Breton might even write “a bone with wings,” especially one “at both ends?”  Zdanys’ deep Euro-American roots gleam with a rich poetic loam, out of which sprout metaphor magnifique.

Another characteristic of Zdanys is his infusing a kind of disciplined magical surrealism, which is somewhat of an oxymoron, found, for instance, in the poetical prose of Bruno Schulz, from his books The Street of Crocodiles or Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, or in the poetry of other Polish poets, such as Nobel Laureate Wislawa Szymborska, or poet/playwright Tadeusz Rozewicz.  The first section of the opening poem in Zdanys’ book The Thin  Light of Winter, entitled “In the Land of Blue Shadow” is a real treat to read and is emblematic of the best of Zdanys.  The poem is attributed to being written “after” Henrikas Nagys.  Again, we as readers are mesmerized and transported by its entrancing rhythms and rich imagery, which are interwoven into a poetic spell that Zdanys casts upon the page, which takes us places beyond us and out of ourselves—which is the mark of any accomplished writing of any kind.

We trace the child’s face in the first snow.

My sister sleeps under wild raspberry branches.

Last night workmen spread light snow

on frozen ground white as my mother’s hair.

We trace my brother’s face in the first  snow.

the  guard’s epileptic daughter crumbles

dry bread on the echoing ground.

We hear it falling  as the wild clouds bleed.

Birds shrug moonlight from their frozen backs.

Beneath the ice rivers flow slowly to the sea.

My sister’s doll sleeps under wild raspberry branches.

We trace my brother’s cold face in the snow.

This poem also resonates with echoes of Miklos Radnoti’s The Clouded Sky, which was a manuscript of poems found by his wife in the Hungarian poet’s coat pockets in a mass grave at the end of World War II after an ill-fated forced march commandeered by the Nazis of the survivors of a concentration camp in which Radnoti had been held prisoner.  Similarly, Zdanys’ parents survived their travails after being in a United Nations camp for Lithuanians before they emigrated to this country and made their home in New Britain, Connecticut where Zdanys was born, in 1950; and, both consequently and most fortunately, what survives in Zdanys is the song of survival, the lyricism of a poetry so original in its craft that through the force of its very words, not unlike the energetic strength of a flower pushing through the ground, we discover that we are, indeed, both body and spirit.

The poetry of Jonas Zdanys is one of a rich poetic heritage and one in which he endows to us in perpetuity his supreme reverence for not only the intellect but the resonance of scrupulously milled words that he has refined into the nourishing bread of song.

The Angled Road: Collected Poems, 1970-2020
Jonas Zdanys
Lamar University Press
ISBN: 978-1942956761