The poet, translator, literary critic, public intellectual, and long-time editor of Vilnius Review Marius Burokas is a figure that holds an important place in Lithuania’s cultural landscape. I first learned about him through social media, where he shared photographers’ works, musical discoveries, and drafts of his own translations and poems. Later, Burokas’s social media account became a source of news about events in Belarus and Ukraine for many people, especially after February 24, 2022, when Russia launched its military invasion. In this way, Burokas came to embody the idea that battles are fought not only with weapons, but also with information, words, poetry, and literature.
Burokas’s fifth poetry collection, Seismografas (Seismograph), reflects on life in turbulent times. However, these are not political or activist verses, nor a documentation of war. Rather, they are attempts to register the tremors of a fragile present, such as personal, social, and global. These prosaic and visual texts are arranged by “intensity” on the Richter scale, from less than 3.5 (barely perceptible tremors) to 8 (destructive earthquakes). Admittedly, it is difficult to define how much each poem trembles on its own (based on its form or content) and how much it shakes the reader or their experience of reading. A less obvious yet much clearer structure is the collection’s geography. Some poems are marked with coordinates that are not easily googleable. These references spark curiosity among readers and demand additional efforts in understanding them. Certain place names that appear in the poems are explained at the end of the book, but I think that is an excessive and unnecessary gesture, which implies a lack of trust in the reader.
It is worth bringing your attention to another aspect of the book’s geography. The book opens with “I will never have…” about an ideal physical home space that the speaker will never have. Later, through the poems, the narrator travels through various cities, such as Minneapolis and Käsmu and across different districts of Vilnius, as if wandering restlessly, unable to find a place. Eventually the narrator appears beside loved ones: the cycle “Trajektorijos” (Trajectories), which reflects on relationships with parents and grandparents; the love cycle “Visatai, radusiai vietą” (To the universe that found its place) dedicated to his wife, Jurgita Jasponytė, also a poet. The name of the cycle serves as an allusion to his wife’s most recent collection. Lastly, “Jūrė prie jūros. Lapkritis” (Jūrė by the sea. November), is also a poem written for a loved one, Burokas’s daughter, Jūrė. Gradually, the geography of the poems circles back to Vilnius and the Naujininkai district, into which the rest of the world seems inevitably to intrude, for example, in the poem “Naujininkų pabėgelių stovykla” (Refugee camp in Naujininkai). Later, the focus shifts to the epicenter of earthquakes: Ukraine. Burokas writes about journeys to a war-torn country and conveys subjective testimonies – for example, the testimonies of grieving parents of the fallen poet Maksym Kryvtsov, a video of a paramedic killed that was found on social media, or a cherry tree growing among the ruins of Chernihiv. Finally, with the poem “pavojingi laikai” (dangerous times), the perspective returns to a reflection closer to home. It’s introspective, a look inward. This structure reveals that Burokas’s poetry is reflective and open, shaped not only by inner experiences but also by constant changes in the surrounding world. The narrator is not self-referential – in fact, he is the opposite – attentive and alert to himself, to others, and to the events surrounding him. He describes what he sees, feels, thinks, and lives through, like a seismsograph attuned to the world.
The seismograph metaphor that is the focal point of the book and the epigraph quoting Belgian writer Louis Paul Boon’s thought about the writer as someone who records the course of events without altering it, in my view, seem to be ironic and aimed at our contemporary life – meaning that we’d rather rely on rationality, knowledge, and calculation. The poems in this book serve as testimonies to the past and present, but they do not speculate about the future. Same as a seismograph, which records and displays but does not predict. The poetic reality created in these poems is not only unpredictable but also paradoxical, estranged, and experienced through perception. The tremors arise from how easily monotony or the ordinariness of the world can be fictionalized: “Covered in lichen of lights, parasites of brightness and hope, you stretch out / with salt-eaten bones, pitted, soiled, beloved.” (p. 25) The narrator continually notices punctuation marks in reality, as if restlessly searching for inspiration for his poems. Or maybe he is unsuccessfully seeking literature itself, like a familiar and safe refuge. Does the drama of the book arise from the sense that everything once known only through texts becomes tangible, as in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, which seems increasingly more real than reality? That poetry does not ease the burden of lived experience, its refuge proving to be only an illusion, as in “Pasaulis baigias…” (The world ends…) (p. 69)? Or perhaps fiction is merely a way to endure, though not necessarily to survive? After all, even if death and destruction are bigger than life, they are not greater than literature, however much they sometimes resist words: “I saw / the white tremor of blossoming, I found no words for it.” (p. 83)
And yet, this is without a doubt the most mature and one of the most pessimistic of Burokas’s poetry collections. There is no youthful rebellion here, as in the playfully experimental Ideogramos (Ideograms), nor the search for self found in the so-called “trilogy of being”: Būsenos (States of being), Išmokau nebūti (I’ve learned not to be), and Švaraus buvimo (Of clean being). The world is ending, so perhaps writing poems is no longer necessary, and thinking about the future seems rather meaningless: “Because that trinity – the world, language, and God – is no longer clear / which of them is alive, or to what extent” (p. 69). The poems reveal a sense of helplessness toward the passing order that has prevailed until now. The observed world is full of unjust death. That is why it’s hopeless. People experience heavy states of being, which call writing and everything else into question, making it impossible to admire beauty anymore. You can only record it, simply and pragmatically, not to create literature out of it, nor to create at all: “More and more I want to leave a trace of unwriting – the silence of intention / the sentence of unspeaking, a brittle full stop, like snow crust / breaking beneath a foot” (from the poem “Tamsos klaviatūra” [The keyboard of darkness], p.71). Culture is looked at skeptically as well, not as a panacea, since it proves just as hopeless. This is reflected upon in the sharply critical and ironic poem “Šiaurės Atėnų literatūra ir menas kultūros baruose” (Literature and art of Šiaurės Atėnai in the fields of culture), whose title points to three Lithuanian cultural press. It seems as though society’s increasing illiteracy has been criticized by people for a long time, but Burokas voices this without generalizing.
And yet, the narrator in Seismografas acknowledges the repetition of history and nature, no matter how furious the injustice that accompanies it. Despite its realistic pessimism, the impression is that we are being called to pause, to endure, and to record the whole of human existence as it is perceived and estranged. Every inevitable earthquake can be withstood but only by remaining together. The poem “Kalėdos. Sentimentalus” (Christmas, Sentimental) sounds most simple yet resonates with the reader the deepest. It ends with the single word in Lithuanian “Apkabinu” (“I embrace you”) Because even the craftsmen of free verse need small but symbolic word: “they hold the world itself in their tangled web.”
