Notebook Sketches

Notebook Sketches presents poems from Jonas Zdanys’ blue notebook, his daily companion and record of his exploration of the many tangential voices and characters he heard and imagined while writing the poems of St. Brigid’s Well and Three White Horses. In many ways, this is the third book in what might be considered a triptych of his considerations of time and place, of personal as well as cultural landscapes, that speak to the fundamental truths found in the random particulars and static moments of the world. What is essential in this book, and in all three volumes, is the fact that there may be something happening before and after the moment of epiphany described in each of these sketches, but that is not presented and is not necessary. The presented moment itself is enough. The poems appear in the order in which they appear in the notebook. They were written with no organizing focus in hand and should be read individually as such, beginning on any open page and with no effort to generate connection or narrative thread, though either or both might be incidentally present. Three of Zdanys’ drawings, randomly made in the notebook as parallel explorations of these ideas and not illustrating any of the poems, are also included.