There are villages, or call them settlements, that cannot be found on maps of the land known to us as Lithuania. Forests, low hills, or the settlements’ own seeming insignificance somehow blind commercial satellites’ eyes to these clusters of houses, long lived in, long dreamed in and of. So distant are these places from well-trafficked roads and towns, that one may suspect they exist only in the imagination. No wonder, then, that the pastoral village—the idea of the place, as much as its actuality—has long been a deep well of inspiration for poets in that part of the world.

Kerry Shawn Keys, the expatriated American-turned-Lithuanian poet, has drunk deeply from that well in writing Seasons at the Patch, a big-hearted, musical collection of poems spanning 272 pages. The collection’s title pays homage to The Seasons by Kristijonas Donelaitis, an eighteenth-century poem of nearly 3000 lines widely regarded as a landmark of the Baltic pastoral. Like this antecedent, Keys’s book makes music of the seasons passing. This offering, though, is more varied, formally and tonally, consisting as it does of many poems instead of The Seasons, which is divided into four distinct parts, one for reach period of the year. Keys ranges from the boisterous antics of a Dionysian reveler, to the elegiac sorrow of an orphan, to the poet’s equanimity and wonder in mystery’s tender embrace.

In his wide-ranging and thoughtful introduction, the poet Al Zolynas calls Seasons at the Patch “a Big Book,” noting that Keys himself “half-kiddingly refers to it as his magnum opus, a gift to his adopted Lithuania.” It arrives only after the release of dozens of shorter collections by Keys, who in one poem here calls himself a “beaver busy poet” with good reason. He has been consistently prolific, arranging his life so that he could practice his art with uncommon singularity of purpose. Though he has dabbled in academe, Keys has mostly avoided the classroom, earning his bread by more varied, inconstant means, and escaping at all costs the nine-to-five. He has lived on Fulbright dollars in Brazil, India, and Lithuania; worked as a tour guide, a dishwasher, a teacher, and freelance editor. Throughout it all, he has upheld the occupation of poet.

One might trace the new book’s origins to the poet’s purchase, some years ago, of a cabin in a lakeside village in the vast Labanoras forest well north of Vilnius, his adopted home city. This would be a mistaken, or at least only very partial explanation of how the book came to be. For the “patch” of the book’s title exists not as a geographic locale, but as a vocational homeland for this long-wandering singer of songs. As Keys tells us in the opening poem, his “Dogpatch” could be “any old place at all.”

Yet, in poem after poem, Keys offers the particulars of the patch of earth, or dream, from which he sings. In “Next” he gives us a kind of tour:

next to the cabin, scraggly brown grass
leading up to the haggard pole fence

next to the useless fence, the dirt road
that travels between gravel and forest

along the dirt road, a few scrumptious snails
on reconnaissance, pebbles, wild thyme

on the road toward the absent neighbors,
foxglove and ramshackle out-buildings

These couplets give us a good taste of Keys’s prosody and show well his easy meandering way through a poem. Treading along with a “walking stick and gimpy gait,” after passing a “shapely woman with a pitchfork / in one calloused hand, an apple in the other,” the poet enters the forest, where, amid falling shadows, John of the Cross appears to take his hand.

In John of the Cross’s famous poem “The Dark Night of the Soul,” the speaker treads into darkness “unobserved”; so too is Keys a solitary wanderer under canopies of night. His patch is a place where he plays a lonely, give-and-take game with death, pulling songs from the void while readying to bequeath himself in turn. In one early poem, he goes fishing on the lake in a dinghy with “maggots and worms” and imagines himself to be a “dried out morsel,” food for whatever might end up on the other end of his line. The poem concludes:

I’ve heard the Leviathan takes plastic
And plankton, and mermaids are avarice
For just about anything, so why not an old poet.

Keys has a sly way of spinning quotidian circumstance into mythic flights of fancy. He’s as ever game for mermaids, but won’t shy from the leviathan either, as he muses and tools about on his dinghy.

If oblivion’s nearness can occasion a bit of self-mockery, it can be austerely beautiful, too, as in “Transforming the Tao,” a compact poem dedicated to Red Pine, the famed translator of ancient Chinese poetry:

Red Pine, skating across
the night sky…the ice
gives way, silence cracks,
echoes off the moon. Our lives
written on silk. The dark mouth
opens, the lake luminous.

Here we see Keys’s talent for deftly working the metaphors nature provides, transforming them before our eyes. The night sky becomes ice, then silk, then a mouth, and at last a lake opening to receive the skater-poet—suggesting perhaps that artmaking, if not all human endeavor, unfurls itself over an abyss, and the very act of creating necessarily applies the exquisite pressure required to crack open the thinly frozen surface on which the artist dances.

This poem is indicative of another feature of this book: Keys’ attraction to Eastern philosophies and the Chinese poetic tradition. In addition to Red Pine, Lao Tzu and Han Shan surface as benevolent spirits, patron saints of the patch, as do Li Bo and Du Fu. These last two, in one funny poem, have a riotous snowball fight before retiring to Keys’s  cabin. There, the three old poets are “Soon in our cups, laughing, and clucking/incoherent poems / to greet the dawn.”

Keys’s work is especially fine when, like much ancient Chinese poetry, he quietly observes what’s near at hand and lets his notations land with only minimal elaboration, as in the final lines of “Autumn”:

Winter will highlight this—
fallen trees that sleep everywhere
in the forest and across my path.
Broken branches already glistening
derelict in the freezing claws
of the thirsty sun.

Keys can be quiet and reserved, but he more often presents himself as a garrulous old hermit tooling about his patch, unearthing poems in molehills and woodpiles. He’s happy to play the part of a fool and solitaire who finds kinship with the lowly creatures of the patch: snails, spiders, flies, jackdaws. In “Moles During the Plague,” one of the many sonnets sprinkled throughout the book, the poet spies “a procession of velvet-capped moles” and imagines it to be a kind of funeral service—and a fine occasion to celebrate: “I’ll put on Oxfords,” the poet declares, “rehearse a song, grab a flask / and march along in my masked Sunday best.”

He enjoys making fun, too, of his own vocation. In “Drafts,” Keys mocks the way he spends his days—partaking of homebrew and beer before drafting “a topsy-turvy poem”. “I didn’t apply for the job but got taken in,” he tells us, “by a wise old tippler as an intern / and then advanced up the ladder / to this venerable top-shelf position.”

This “occupation” has led the speaker of these poems to eschew the temptations and banalities of Babylon in favor of solitude. Keys satisfies himself with the humble, natural gifts afforded to a pensioner poet in the sticks, where, unlike the more glamorous “poetic geniuses” gathering in cities of the world, he declares himself to be “just the genius loci of my house / off key, out of step, but spirited nonetheless / with  moonshine in an off-color blacklist.”

In “The Snowglobe”, the poet tells us,

We don’t have anything
like an agora in the Dogpatch.
We’re darn lucky in a way
to just get by with books, gardens, boats,
an occasional hootenanny, gossip.

This chatty, folksy register gives way, later in the poem, to soulful ruminations on the lives of his absent children, and concludes with a kind of wistful prayer that their home city will endure the adversities besieging it, which Keys lists: ”locusts, / the drought, betrayal, the riches, the famine / and the battles that burn in the hearts of men.”

Some of these poems have the aura of prayer, though if Keys has a religion, it’s poetry. Music born of oblivion is all the liturgy to be had at the “Dogpatch.” So persistent is he in singing of death that one might be reminded of Flannery O’Conner’s Wise Blood, where Hazel Motes fanatically denies Christ precisely because he cannot escape his faith.

In a poem occasioned by a naturalist’s visit to the patch to collect moths, the speaker recalls Faustian dealings in his past. Watching the collector hang out his trap, Keys tells us: “Times like this I wonder about karma and redemption / quite ready to fuse a Christian upbringing with things Indian.” When a moth, enticed by a burning candle, visits the poet, he envisions the moth asking “whether I would like to burn along with it to a dimension / never before seen or imagined, a deep space far beyond / anything human with no such option as original sin.”

These lines, and the entire gift of this book, give form to Keys’s longing for a home not found on any ordinary map of the world. Poem by poem, he brings a new home into being; he calls it the “Dogpatch.” It’s a place abundant in pleasure and verse, soaked in sorrow, and peopled with old poets and gods. Pay a visit, and you’ll likely find Keys out front of his cabin, spinning a new poem for you to take on your journey.