Vanished Roads: Making a Haiku Collection Tell a Story

One thing that mattered to us from the beginning with Vanished Roads was that it become a whole book, not simply a stack of haiku that happened to have the same author's name on them.

                    

That distinction might seem small, especially with haiku. A haiku is designed to survive on its own. It has its own little weather system, its own moment, its own beginning and ending. You can open a collection almost anywhere, read one poem, close the book, and theoretically you have experienced something complete. There is nothing wrong with making a collection that way. But that wasn't what I wanted Vanished Roads to be.

The poems had accumulated over a long and difficult period of my life, and when I began looking at them together I realized they weren't actually separate. Certain things kept returning: abandoned places, animals, roads, weather, objects people had discarded, small signs of persistence, and moments when the natural world seemed to be quietly reclaiming whatever human beings had left behind. More importantly, the emotional atmosphere of the poems changed. There was movement in them.

Once I saw that, sequencing became part of the writing.

The book begins in a darker and more enclosed place and gradually moves outward. It doesn't suddenly announce that everything is better. I wouldn't have believed a book that did that, and I certainly couldn't have written one. Instead, little openings begin appearing. The world becomes visible again. Animals arrive. Light changes. Humor returns. The landscape starts becoming something other than a backdrop for loss.

That same movement became important visually.

Tré's cover for Vanished Roads isn't simply packaging placed around the poems after the fact. The enormous tree, the narrow passage through it, the distant light and the road continuing beyond it all belong to the same journey the poems are making. Her illustrations throughout the book work the same way. We wanted the visual and poetic elements to feel as though they had grown from the same landscape.

That's why Michael Dylan Welch's description of Vanished Roads as a “well-designed haiku collection” pleased me so much. He also described the experience of reading it as one of “enjoyable patience.” Both observations get at something we were consciously trying to accomplish. The book isn't asking the reader to race toward a conclusion. Its changes happen incrementally, poem by poem, image by image.

Maybe that's appropriate for haiku. Emergence doesn't require a trumpet blast.

Sometimes it's just the next thing you notice.

Vanished Roads by Thomas L. Vaultonburg, with cover and illustrations by Tré, was published by Wolf Twin Books in 2026.

Vanished Roads at Wolf Twin Books

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