Emerging in the early 1960s as a poet of extraordinary breadth and complexity, Sigitas Geda has since established a reputation as one of the leading figures in contemporary Lithuanian literature and as a writer of international importance. Resistant to the dominant literary trends imposed by the postwar cultural establishment, Geda sought to redefine the creative experience by portraying the metamorphosis evolving within the human consciousness as a process of rebirth and discovery. As a poet, translator, essayist, and author of literature for children, Geda has amassed a significant body of work in which he attempts to explore the collective consciousness of the human experience, incorporating mythological and symbolic imagery as a means to juxtapose primordial life with modern existence. As critic and translator Jonas Zdanys notes in a 1998 article in World Literature Today, Geda's work reveals "a poetic sensitivity of great emotional intensity that seeks to unite the...