After nearly thirty years since the publication of his first poetry book Rabi, which appeared in 1998 after winning the First Book Contest organized by the Lithuanian Writers’ Union, Mindaugas Kvietkauskas makes a powerful return with his second poetry collection Gruntiniai vandenys (Groundwaters). This book also includes prose-poetry and poetry translations. The texts flow seamlessly into one another and form a unified whole, like water that refreshes and quenches the thirst for quality poetry. As a poet and literary scholar, Kvietkauskas combines elements of confessional and intellectual poetry. His ability to connect lyrical and scholarly approaches guides the reader toward both aesthetic pleasure and reflections on historical, cultural, and social contexts.
The book is divided into three sections: “Miesto virgule” (The city’s dowsing rod), “Mažos ginklų slaptavietės” (Small weapons caches), and “Intakų gyslos” (The veins of tributaries). Each section opens with a piece of Kvietkauskas’s prose-poetry, setting the tone and hinting at the themes to be explored in the following poems. These essay-like texts (“Santakos” [Confluence], “Romėniški skaičiai” [Roman numerals], and “Duino versmės” [The Duino springs]”) help the reader understand how to approach and unlock the meaning of the poems. Each section also includes translations of poems by Jewish and Polish authors such as Avrom Sutzkever, Anna Świrszczyńska, Czesław Miłosz, and Itzik Manger that complement the book’s themes.
Kvietkauskas translates from Yiddish, and several of his translations have been published in Lithuanian, including “Žaliasis akvariumas” (The green aquarium, 2013), a collection of prose-poetry by Avrom Sutzkever, mentioned earlier. These authors were not chosen accidentally. In an interview, Kvietkauskas noted that they are important to him and have influenced the direction of his own poetry. It seems that the entire collection can be linked by the key word junction – the merging of past and present, man and woman, physical and platonic love, lyricism and rationality.
The first section surprises with its rather unusual, slightly mystical title “The city’s dowsing rod.” In the late Middle Ages, dowsing rods (or twigs) were often used to search for underground water veins, minerals, lost objects, or missing persons. The title suggests that, with the narrator and this superstition-laden rod, we will search for both the visible and lost outlines of the city – specifically Vilnius – for cracks in the present through which fragments of the historical past, significant figures, mythology, and religious details can be found.
Each of these cracks also reveals the narrator’s personal connection to the past, whose traces are found in the city’s ruins, street names, or abandoned places. Every story is woven with his emotional and physical experiences, merging points where history meets the present. Even the book’s title points to things hidden from plain sight, things buried deep below the surface, pressed down by greater forces. Sometimes it’s hard to open up to others: “I don’t know how to explain it to you; I’m ashamed of such feelings” (p. 17).
In these poems, Vilnius serves merely as a backdrop against which the narrator’s states of mind, historical facts, various cultures, and attachments to a place unfold. Every street, building, or historical figure mentioned, which are often linked in some way to religion, such as Moses, Abraham, or Saint Stephen, creates the impression of traveling through time, but in a way that feels smooth, natural, and unforced. Vilnius and the narrator are like streams flowing into one another at different points – sometimes they cross, sometimes miss each other, but they always reconnect. Rivers, in fact, become the central metaphor of the entire book.
The second section, “Small weapons caches,” unlike the first, introduces more specific imagery and emotional openness. The style of narration shifts, meaning that confessional poetry becomes livelier, offering images of everyday life. From the first untitled poem (p. 51), it becomes clear that these poems are the “weapon caches” where experiences of weakness, helplessness, and hurt are stored, while the act of writing serves as a kind of psychological recovery. Everything written down is carefully gathered and preserved, though there is always the possibility that, one day, these “weapons” will shoot out, just like those hidden groundwaters.
Although the poem is written in the second person, it is clear that the narrator is speaking about himself. The choice to use the second person creates distance between the “I” and the common, universal experience in order to avoid pathos. At the end of the section, this image of the poem as a weapon continues in the poem “Magiškas ginklas”(The magic weapon) (p. 74-75), which suggests that anything can become a weapon. Even the poet’s letter can be like a bullet, waiting its turn to be fired and wound someone.
This section stands out for its intimacy, its hints of Kvietkauskas’s own biography, and its openness. The poems include the passage of time, moving from the experiences of a schoolboy to those of an adult hiding in the cracks of reality. The poems from this section mark different stages and moments of life, unfolding with the narrator’s gentle, sensitive voice in a style that feels both pure and uniquely literary.
The third section of the book, “The veins of tributaries,” is the most sensuous and emotionally charged. Here, spiritual, physical, and emotional connections with a woman, or rather, with the very idea of woman, become central. The woman is admired so much that it’s a painfully sweet aesthetic experience. The idea of a woman becomes an inexhaustible source of life, where the narrator experiences aesthesis – a heightened perception that gives meaning to existence.
This strong spiritual magnetism is grounded not only in emotion but also in the spaces of cities and the different cultures. Love here is tied to locations, beginning with Vilnius and expanding to New York and Paris, whose cultural contrasts shape a more wandering, restless experience of love. In these poems, the reader feels not only adoration and desire but also heaviness and sorrow, as in the poem “Poliglotų gatvės” (Streets of polyglots): “when two / long-delayed / solitudes suddenly touch” (p. 89). For the narrator and his poetic soul, the experience of love casts bliss as well as the shadow of suffering.
One of the book’s greatest strengths lies in its uniquely aestheticized language. Kvietkauskas uses picturesque language and crafts texts that are clear and polished to their purest form. Although he blends styles from different eras (his work influenced by classical and Romantic worldviews), his poetry cannot be classified as postmodern. The narrator moves through both physical and metaphysical spaces and finds himself in Vilnius and other cities as well as across time periods, social roles, cultures, and belief systems. Kvietkauskas remains true in his poetry to what matters to him as both a person and a poet. A deep attention to the environment, to others, and to himself becomes the central axis of the book.
The book also includes Kvietkauskas’s own photographs. The play of light and shadow within them introduces an urban mysticism to the text, evokes a merging of different pasts and presents, and suggests moments of symbolic openness and closure. Given the amount of intertextuality in the book, the reader can sense a kind of dialogue between the poems and the photographs. Looking at them, I’m reminded of the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s idea that when you look at a painting – or, in this case, a photograph – you don’t just see it, but see through it or with it. The photographs aren’t necessarily meant to provoke strong aesthetic emotion on their own; their principle of historical transformation is more important. The visuals seem to carry the reader to other eras or bring the past closer to the present. Their worn, scratched, punctured, or torn subjects turn photography into a kind of language – a language that marks the intersection of the past’s endurance with the present’s impermanence.
I’ve never read a poetry book so structurally and logically composed. I’m sure others exist, but for me, this was the most significant poetic discovery of the year. What matters here is the poetic expression as well as the cultural and historical contexts that deeply root themselves throughout the entire collection. And yet, these contexts never feel forced. Instead, they are an organic part of the text. The poems flow seamlessly one into the next, always guided by Kvietkauskas’s core values: fidelity to history, culture, literature, and the nurturing of connection with the self and with others. This is poetry that refreshes the mind.
