Kazys Bradūnas

The participants of the "Žemė" anthology were Kazys Bradūnas, Juozas Kėkštas, Vytautas Mačernis (post-humously), Henrikas Nagys, Alfonsas Nyka-Niliūnas.

The movement was advocating Lithuanian poetry with distinct roots in the earth, drawing its strength from Lithuania's agricultural heritage and folklore.

Of these, Bradūnas communicated most directly the physical sense of loss which overwhelms a farmer torn away from the familiar objects in his native house and field.

His first book in exile, The Alien Bread (1945), is full of small painful vignettes of daily experience where the smell of a flower, a bend in the river, or the pale light of the morning would deceive and comfort the traveler by their intimate familiarity — only to shock him afterwards with the realization that the flower was not known at home, the river bears some strange German name, and the morning promises another day of hard labor for alien masters.

His poems are complex in their implied references to the continuum of life through all the Lithuanian generations which had sacrificed themselves in order that their land should prosper green again and again" ([2]).