With the demise of the Soviet Union, Lithuania jumped from a neo-romantic modernism straight into the postmodern wasteland of unfettered capitalism. Pensions disappeared along with jobs. Everything underwent "reform". Everything was for sale. Poetry audiences went from stadium size to coffee house size. Giddy joy was followed by disillusion, anxiety, angst. Gintaras Grajauskas's poetry cannot be understood without this backdrop, for it was here that he cut his poetic teeth and became a major Lithuanian poet. He met the jarring changes around him with a wry smile, black humour, irony - all grounded in respect for the quotidian, the small, the insignificant. Reading his poems, one can laugh and grind one's teeth at the same time. We can see the influences of Polish poetry in the irony and search for meaning in a new cultural landscape. We can see the rejection of lyrical language for the prosaic, the pithy. Paradoxical, absurd, witty and observant, Grajauskas reflects a society that has seemingly lost interest in speaking for itself, for the whole. The individual is on his/her own. Life is tough, and to be alive today is to drift in uncertainty, but it is a human life that cannot sustain itself on cynicism and irony. We question, we search, and we laugh through the tears, reading his work, knowing ourselves better.

Ausra Kaziliunaite's poetry has been described as `post-avant-garde'; she is unafraid to shock readers with her surreal, ugly-beautiful imagery, alternative form, and regular resistance to the rigidity of social norms. In The Moon is a Pill, a collection of the best of Ausra's poetry, translated by Rimas Uzgiris, the reader discovers the extent of the poet's social engagement, mixed with a swirl of psychedelia through an existential lens. As she walks around her city, questioning God, stalked by an abandoned stuffed bird, finding a grubby child in an egg, searching for answers in bus stops and windows, her writing is intimate and personal, yet never reassuring, never fluffy, and often with a quiet nod to the complex political past of her country: who can stop you from writing what you want?/ we must understand that his times were those of censorship/ we now live in a greenhouse like some kind of tomato... from `Freedom'. The Moon is a Pill is part of the Parthian Baltic project which will be launched on time for the London Book Fair 2018. The poetry collections were launched at the Wheatsheaf Parthian Poetry Festival in April 2018.

In the post-war period, when most poets in Lithuania were writing about politics, or when they were focusing their lyricism on the pastoral, Judita Vaičiūnaitė (1937-2001), without ignoring either politics or her bonds with nature, became a poet of the city. Instead of paeans to forest and farm, we find flowers growing out of cracks on the sidewalks, trees dropping their petals over garbage heaps, and run-down buildings overcome with a rich luxuriance of weeds. Instead of tradition-bound country life, we encounter the cosmopolitan woman discovering herself in cafes, cramped Soviet apartments, and labyrinthine streets. This thematic concern is connected to her style of sharp and sudden contrasts and juxtapositions. Tender lyricism is cut with violence and foreboding. Randomness, sudden change, and danger form parts of her poetic experience as much as the beautiful facade, the church bells, and the cobbled streets. Vaičiūnaitė’s city is also the locus of her exploration of the modern woman’s identity: single, educated, working, free. There are poems of love and poems of struggle against the restraints of a patriarchal world, of conflicts between the freedom and power to seek her own career path and the responsibilities of motherhood. Nevertheless, Vaičiūnaitė did not disconnect herself from her country’s past, writing lyrical poems from the perspective of historical and mythological figures. Notably, her personages are often woman. As a result, the voices of Lithuanian history and myth have never been richer.

This book takes a new look at the discussion of poetry in Plato's early dialogues. It argues that Socrates did not believe poets to be divinely inspired; rather, his treatment of poetry must be approached from the point of view of two key Socratic concerns: the nature of desire, and the distinction between techne (science) and empeiria (a knack). Both point to a radical stance on the nature of psychological states. Socrates argues that all desire leading to action is for our own good, so when we act in error about our good, we do not desire to do what we do. Thus, we don't know what we desire until we know what is good for us. Since there are no irrational desires that can lead us to act, to err is to be ignorant. Therefore, virtue is this techne of knowing what is good for us. Socrates treats all of our psychological states like desire: we cannot have knowledge of pleasures, beliefs, or intentions without knowledge of the reality towards which those states are directed. So, what a poet means can only be understood if the subject matter of the poem is understood (by technai). Accordingly, the knowledge of virtue must primarily be gained through philosophical dialogue.