With The Grove of the Eumenides, the Lithuanian poet Tomas Venclova affirms his place as one of Europe’s greatest living poets, the heir to Akhmatova, Mandelstam and Miłosz. Venclova’s masterful poetry upholds a vision of the world that enables us to endure the darkness of our time through his singular insights, ethical endurance and profound compassion. With classical grace, yet manifesting a deep commitment to remain a witness to the contemporary world, The Grove of the Eumenides is a collection of great wisdom.

Venclova’s poetry addresses the desolate landscape of the aftermath of totalitarianism, as well as the ethical constants that allow for hope and perseverance. Bloodaxe published another selection of his poetry, The Junction, in 2008, bringing together new translations of his most recent work from that time as well as a selection of poems from his 1997 volume Winter Dialogue.

While The Junction covered poems written while he was still in Lithuania before his forced emigration – and poems from his first decades in the US dealing with exile – The Grove of the Eumenides addresses ‘later life’ issues of democracy, memory, climate, travel, ethics and ageing. There is no overlap between the two editions.

'Picking up where Venclova’s previous selected volume, The Junction, left off, the poems in The Grove of the Eumenides offer a strong sense of the poet’s late style: often rhyming, employing iambic or syllabic metrical patterns, and with many examining the themes of aging, memory, and cycles of history. The resulting collection is layered with myth, philosophy, and political wisdom, shimmering with rich context and thoughtful diction, and invokes a compassionate, democratic spirit that is as important now as it has always been. [...] Ellen Hinsey, Diana Senechal, and Rimas Uzgiris have provided a great service by presenting Venclova in their unified, expert translations. [...] From Eastern Europe to Greece, Greenland to Hamden, Connecticut, Venclova takes the reader on a tour across the world and the historical events that have made it, in turns, so horrifying and so beautiful. Both Brodsky and Miłosz won Nobels, and after reading this exquisite collection, I’m left wondering: Where’s Venclova’s?' – Jason Gordy Walker, Asymptote Journal (What’s New in Translation: November 2025) 

‘Venclova is a lyric poet of magisterial allure, committed to philosophical meditations…Part exile, part seer, he is the artist as witness and a living example of a literary elite that evolved in crisis yet remained true to the dictates of art.’ – Eileen  Battersby, Irish Times

‘Every major poet has an idiosyncratic inner landscape against which his voice sounds in his mind… [Venclova’s] landscape is that of the Baltic in winter, a monochromatic setting dominated by damp and cloudy hues – the light of the skies condensed into darkness.’ – Joseph Brodsky

‘If in Venclova’s volume, Winter Dialogue, there is a concern with endurance, and a search for absolutes in the face of adverse conditions both in Lithuania and in exile, in his most recent work, The Junction, we find the figure of a poet returning from exile, surveying what has occurred, what buildings still stand, and the fates of those one loved. And while these poems are filled with melancholy at the passage of time, there is also a sense of affirmation. For despite everything, each element that is salvaged constitutes a form of victory – a testimony to all that can be, and is, preserved from the vicissitudes of History.’ – Ellen Hinsey