Book Review of Vanished Roads A Haiku Journey Through Grief and Back Into the World
by Millard Rausch, University of Pennsylvania
Vanished Roads is less a collection of individual haiku than a journey told in small moments. Thomas L. Vaultonburg begins in grief and isolation and gradually moves outward, into forests, mountains, rivers, animals, weather, and finally a renewed sense of belonging in the world.
The poems are spare, but many contain an unexpected turn that changes the image completely. A bare tree is still capable of holding the sky. A power outage gives the stars their old jobs back. A bucket drawn from a mountain well comes up full of stars. Elsewhere, coyotes deliver sermons, hats become pilgrims, and a mountain path worth following is precisely the one that goes nowhere.
What impressed me most is the architecture of the book. Images and ideas recur and transform as the poems progress. Doors, roads, wounds, reflections, footsteps and names gradually give way to a speaker becoming less separate from the landscape around him. By the final poems, the distinction between traveler and wilderness has nearly disappeared.
Tré's black-and-white illustrations are used sparingly and beautifully, giving certain poems room to expand visually without overwhelming their simplicity.
There is grief here, but Vanished Roads isn't ultimately a book about remaining inside grief. It's about what happens afterward: walking long enough to discover that the world is still strange, funny, beautiful, and capable of receiving you.
A thoughtful collection for readers of contemporary haiku, nature poetry, and short contemplative writing.
-Dr. Millard Rausch
No comments:
Post a Comment