Vanished Roads
A Review by Pippa Phillips, Editor of Prune Juice Journal
Thomas L. Vaultonburg’s Vanished Roads, a collection of haiku (and, to my mind, senryu), is a pleasure to read, possessing a satisfying variety united by thematic throughlines. The tone ranges from the homey to the surreal, the author's voice unobtrusive but personal. It has the feeling of a deep, light night conversation with an old friend: intimate, unforced, occasionally funny, and capable of sudden profundity.
The volume features a number of stand-out poems, several of which I will examine. What strikes me is its genuine popular appeal: these poems have a muscular simplicity without sacrificing depth.
Vaultonburg demonstrates a highly developed sense of the possibilities of the micropoem. The poems drift from outside to inside, through the seasons, from lightness to grief, even in the same poem:
spin fast enough
and the wound
becomes a door
Here, strange logic brings the poem to a surreal conclusion. The imperative casts an immediate spell, pulling you into the orbit of the grotesque before abruptly opening a way out– or is it in? Vaultonburg makes use of the double meaning of ‘wound’– perhaps (because of the spinning) it’s the past participle of ‘wind’, like a watch. More likely, it’s an injury. Implication likens the latter to something else that both opens and serves as a barrier. If the body is a house, trauma is an unwelcome guest.
Grief lurks in the domestic– furniture, a coat, in a woodpile, in a door: Vaultonburg grounds regret, perseverance, transcendence, and joy in the concrete. The poems’ emotional and philosophical weight emerges through the transformation of ordinary objects and experiences.
The poems demonstrate effective use of Western literary techniques, while also displaying a wonderful sense of many Japanese aesthetics. Here, Vaultonburg’s use of personification has a plausible deniability– perhaps the author is not talking to a storm, but the reader.
storm clearing—
you too
are allowed to arrive
Below, the poet cultivates an atmosphere of holy mystery in just a few strokes. This haiku initiates the reader by calling attention to lapsed attention. Already we are focused on what is missing– the deer. Only, it hasn’t departed. It has transformed into something else, something that remains. This is yūgen, the grace that works beyond human ken.
not watching
the moment the deer
becomes the woods again
Vaultonburg’s poems are artless in the best sense– they don’t wear their artistry on their sleeve. They are accessible without becoming simple, sophisticated without becoming complicated. Again and again, things shift into other things: a wound becomes a door, a deer becomes the woods, a hat becomes a pilgrim. There is a weight that the artist refuses to succumb to, a tempered joy. A solid and satisfactory collection.
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