Semeniškių idiles [Idylls of Semeniskiai].

one of 200 copies

Early DP-era publication by the Lithuanian-American Fluxus artist, poet, and cinematographer Jonas Mekas (1922–2019), illustrated with rawings by Vytautas L. Adamkevičius (1923–1998). The book was published in a camp for Lithuanian Displaced Persons (DP) in post-war Germany, where Mekas, his brother Adolfas, and Adamkevičius found themselves after World War II. Together, they also published several jointly-authored volumes of experimental prose and poetry under the'Žvilgsniai' imprint, as well as the eponymous avant-garde literary and arts journal (three issues appeared in 1947–1948). In 1949, Mekas would move to New York, embarking on his career as an experimental film maker and fluxus artist.

The fragile publication offers a very rare window into Jonas Mekas' formative period. In 2007, an English translation by Adolfas Mekas was published in New York, on which the poet John Ashbery remarked: 'Nature,all but unmediated, pulses through the poems of recollected childhood that renowned filmmaker Jonas Mekas wrote in displaced camps in Germany just after World War II. Barred from returning to his native Lithuania, which had been occupied by the Russians, he concentrated instead on conjuring lost landscapes in free-verse "idylls" that recall Virgil's Georgics, Hölderlin, Stifter, Clare, Leopardi, Rilke, Pasternak, and William Carlos Williams, and are as direct as cinematography.' This is one of the scarcest of Mekas' known DP publications, with a print run of only 200 copies with the illustrations.

Limited edition, one of 200 illustrated copies (there were a further 200 without illustrations); 4to (26.8 × 21.2 cm); five full-page illustrations; original staple-stitched illustrated wrappers, very minor wear to spine, otherwise a fine copy.