Small Songs for Weary Travelers: Finding a Larger World by Making Life Smaller

There is a sentence near the beginning of Small Songs for Weary Travelers that explains almost everything that follows:

“In late 2019 I went from having a very large life to having a very small life.”

 

Thomas L. Vaultonburg's Small Songs for Weary Travelers, published in 2023, is a book of haiku, but it is also the record of what happened after that sentence became true.

The introduction describes a period of contraction. Whatever plans existed for returning to a larger world were interrupted when, only a few months later, the world itself contracted. The pandemic closed doors that were already closing. Vaultonburg's response was counterintuitive: instead of fighting immediately to make his life larger again, he deliberately made his field of attention smaller.

“So I did the only thing that made sense in a world that had suddenly gotten small,” he writes. “I went even smaller.”

That decision is the beginning of Small Songs for Weary Travelers.

Vaultonburg studied Buddhism and Zen, although he describes the process less as conversion than assimilation: Zen simply became his “default setting.” On January 1, 2020, he began writing only haiku. The restriction produced an unexpected freedom. If the body could not travel freely through the world, attention still could. Words could. Imagination could.

And then something else happened. He reconnected with one of his oldest friends, Tré, and the two began a creative collaboration. The world eventually reopened, but by then Vaultonburg discovered that he no longer particularly wanted the old large world back. He preferred this one: a smaller world populated by Bashō, Issa, Buson, a creative partner, animals, trees, rivers, moonlight, tea, and whatever happened to wander across the trail that morning.

That history matters because otherwise Small Songs can be mistaken for a collection of individually clever nature poems. It is much more coherent than that.

It is a book about learning to inhabit what remains.

The World Hasn't Gone Anywhere

Nature in these poems is rarely scenery. The animals and plants are doing things entirely independent of the poet, and quite often they seem considerably wiser than he is.

One of the funniest examples occurs during the apocalypse:

the world is ending
and yet my aloe blooms have
heard nothing of this

The joke is excellent, but the idea underneath it is central to the collection. Human catastrophe is not necessarily universal catastrophe. We announce the end of the world when what we frequently mean is the end of our arrangement with the world. Meanwhile, aloe blooms.

The trees aren't particularly impressed with us either. In “origin,” human beings go looking for their roots while the trees, which actually have roots, politely suppress their amusement.

Again and again, the nonhuman world quietly corrects human self-importance.

A stone can remain silent for aeons and reveal itself when placed against a breast. A stream patiently transforms an arrowhead into a pebble that can become a baby's rattle. Wind rearranging fallen leaves turns out to be an architect.

These aren't poems about conquering nature, deciphering nature, or even escaping into nature.

They are poems about getting over yourself sufficiently to notice it.

That distinction is important.

Zen With Mosquitoes

There is Buddhism throughout Small Songs for Weary Travelers, but mercifully little interest in behaving like a holy man.

Vaultonburg's Zen contains mosquitoes, tacos, dung beetles, gift shops and occasional profanity.

In “Gift Shop,” a master's book about austerity sells briskly in the zendo gift shop. In “rooftop,” Buddhas ride bicycles while other Buddhas eat tacos. An octopus writes perhaps the most concise spiritual instruction in the entire collection with her ink: “stay the fuck away.”

And “reductio ad zendo” reduces spiritual instruction until almost nothing remains:

there is nothing you need to do
there is nothing you need
there is nothing

The humor isn't decoration pasted onto the philosophy. It is part of the philosophy.

A writer can make Zen unbearably solemn very quickly. Vaultonburg seems constitutionally incapable of allowing that to happen. Every time enlightenment threatens to become grandiose, a possum gets into the garbage.

That may be one of the book's greatest strengths.

The poems aren't asking the reader to transcend ordinary existence. They continually push the reader back into it.

The Bestiary

There are enough animals in Small Songs to populate a peculiar ark: wolves, bears, crows, coyotes, foxes, possums, rabbits, trout, catfish, ocelots, beetles, dragonflies, cicadas, hummingbirds, mosquitoes, skunks, hawks and numerous others.

But they aren't symbols in the conventional poetic sense.

Coyote is Coyote.

Possum is Possum.

The mosquito wants blood.

The trout eats the mayfly.

The poet doesn't demand that nature conform to human morality before he agrees to love it.

One of the most revealing poems in the book may be “nothing personal”:

but i love you said
hare to wolf, AND i love you
too said wolf to hare

That is funny until you think about it.

Love does not eliminate appetite. Affection doesn't cancel mortality. The wolf remains a wolf and the hare remains lunch. Small Songs repeatedly refuses the sentimental version of nature in which everything exists to reassure the human observer.

The book's natural world is beautiful precisely because it doesn't need us.

And Yet This Is a Love Book

For all the animals, Zen jokes and wandering, another presence gradually becomes impossible to miss.

There is a “you.”

And that “you” changes the scale of the book.

Early in the collection, “abundance” offers a wonderfully modest inventory:

leaves for my water,
a pen, your smile.

Later, an entire philosophy of sufficient existence emerges in “juniper”:

i can live in a
world as small as you and i
and that juniper

That may be the emotional center of Small Songs for Weary Travelers.

The small world introduced at the beginning of the book is no longer a deprivation.

It has become enough.

This is where the book's title begins to acquire its full meaning. The traveler isn't necessarily somebody crossing continents. Travel can mean surviving time. Moving through grief. Entering another season. Walking beside someone. Becoming someone slightly different from the person who began the journey.

And companionship does not end the journey. It changes what traveling means.

“If I die on the road with you,” one poem says, “I do not die / I become the road.”

That is a remarkably large idea for seventeen or so syllables.

The Screw City Is Still in There

For all its forests, rivers and spiritual wandering, this is also unmistakably the work of a Midwestern poet.

Corn appears. So does the Rock River. So does Blackhawk. So does the Screw City itself.

In “Magnet Fishing At the Fordham Dam,” dedicated to Ryan Davis, the poet drags the river bottom and pulls up “rusty remnants / of the Screw City.”

Elsewhere, the landscape becomes “miles of corn and hogs' / blood down the slaughterhouse / drain.”

This isn't imported Japanese scenery dressed up as Midwestern haiku. Vaultonburg borrows a poetic tradition but writes from where his feet actually are.

That is one reason the book works.

Bashō's road does not run through seventeenth-century Japan anymore.

Here it runs past Fordham Dam.

The Old Poet Didn't Completely Disappear

Readers familiar with Vaultonburg's earlier poetry will recognize another tension running through the collection.

The guy who wrote the older poems is still in there.

He hasn't suddenly become a serene nature poet incapable of cynicism, anger, lust, absurdity or black humor. He has simply acquired another way of looking.

Occasionally the old voice erupts spectacularly.

A blobfish knows nobody is coming into the abyss “to sort their shit out.” Humanity becomes carbon life “broil[ing] / under an angry heat lamp” until somebody announces, “ding! all finished.”

But those moments no longer dominate the landscape.

That's the important transformation.

The darkness hasn't been disproved.

It has been put into proportion.

There are flowers here too.

There is water.

There is another person.

There is tea.

There is an extremely persistent possum.

Small Songs

The final effect of reading more than two hundred pages of Small Songs for Weary Travelers is surprisingly cumulative. Any individual poem may occupy only a few lines, but together they begin to resemble footsteps.

One.

Then another.

Then another.

The book even tells us what to do when direction fails. In “get lost,” the universe keeps changing the signs until the speaker discovers he is “home everywhere.”

And near the end comes “Unravel”:

as i unravel
I become miles of new thread
to weave with again

That poem could almost serve as an alternative introduction to the entire collection.

Something unraveled.

A life became smaller.

Then the world became smaller.

Instead of pretending none of this had happened, the poet followed the loose thread.

He followed it into Zen and haiku, into woods and rivers, into a renewed creative partnership, into Wolf Twin Books, and eventually into this book. Even the physical object acknowledges that companionship: Tré designed the cover, and Small Songs is dedicated simply “For Tré.”

By the end, the smallness introduced on the first page no longer seems small at all.

That may be what Small Songs for Weary Travelers ultimately understands better than most books about renewal: a life does not necessarily have to become what it was in order to become large again.

Sometimes recovery of the world happens at the scale of a haiku.

A crow.

A river.

A cup of tea.

A juniper.

Someone beside you.

And one more step down the road.

My Absolutely True Alice's Restaurant Story

 My Absolutely True Alice's Restaurant Story

I grew up with Arlo Guthrie's "Alice's Restaurant Massacree." I knew the song. I knew the movie. I knew about Alice and Ray living in the old church and Arlo getting himself into trouble because of a large quantity of garbage.

This becomes relevant.

I met Jenny at Castaways, a dive bar in Rockford that my brother and I owned. She came in with a group of women who were organizing the Rockford Rage Roller Derby, and I believe she was something like the fifth woman to join the league. Castaways became their unofficial headquarters for a while, and Jenny was one of the people who started turning up regularly. I didn't know it then, but our orbits were on a collision course for the next fourteen years.

After Castaways closed its doors, I was between lives. Jenny had done some posters for the Rage, and I remembered liking them, so one day I contacted her on MySpace. This was when contacting someone on MySpace was a perfectly reasonable thing for an adult to do.

I told her I was working on a children's book called Atrocious Poems A to Z and asked if she might be interested in illustrating it. "Working on" is probably generous. I had an idea for a children's book called Atrocious Poems A to Z, which is not exactly the same thing as having a children's book called Atrocious Poems A to Z.

Less than a week later, Jenny sent me an illustration for the first poem, "A is for Asparagus." It was perfect.

Page 1 from Atrocious Poems A to Z

This presented me with an immediate problem because now I actually had to write the book.

So I did.

Jenny and I began spending more time together, and eventually I learned that she and her husband Dan lived in an old Lutheran church in Pecatonica, Illinois. The first time I walked into the place, I knew immediately that I had entered Alice's Restaurant.

Not metaphorically. I mean there was the church.

It still had its stained-glass windows. It still had a stage at the front where sermons, performances, announcements and whatever else Lutheran congregations do from stages had once emanated. The building was enormous, but Jenny and Dan essentially lived in only two areas of it. Most of the rest of the building was still just this cavernous old church surrounding the relatively small portion where two people were actually conducting their lives.

And I had seen this movie. I knew where this kind of thing could lead.

At first the similarities were amusing. Arlo had Alice and Ray living in a church. I had Jenny and Dan living in a church. There were artists and unconventional people involved. There was a general feeling that ordinary residential architecture had somehow been rejected as insufficient for the situation.

Then I learned another little detail. Arlo Guthrie and Alice Brock had written a children's book together, Mooses Come Walking. Jenny and I were writing a children's book together.

Now, I am willing to tolerate a certain amount of coincidence from the universe. You have to. Otherwise you start becoming the kind of person who finds messages intended specifically for you in the license plates of passing automobiles.

So I let that one go.

Eventually Jenny invited me over to mow the lawn. This is one of those sentences that doesn't sound particularly important when you say it, but in retrospect there aren't that many people in your life whose lawn you begin mowing at an old Lutheran church.

Shortly after Jenny and I had become very close, Dan, who had been the city manager of Pecatonica, got a job in the oil industry in Houston. They were moving to Texas, and they were moving fast. So fast, in fact, that they hired me to clean out the church.

This is where anyone familiar with "Alice's Restaurant" should begin experiencing some concern on my behalf.

There was a lot of stuff in that church. Some of it had apparently been sitting in the basement for decades. There were books, paperwork, glassware, and assorted objects whose usefulness had expired so long ago that nobody was quite sure what their usefulness had originally been. Much of it was already moldy and unpleasant before I ever touched it.

I hauled it out. And hauled it out. And hauled it out.

Eventually I had everything that needed to go outside, bagged and ready for the city to collect. Jenny and Dan were headed for Houston. The church was cleaned out. My work was finished.

Except it wasn't.

Because a thunderstorm came through.

The rain soaked the garbage. Now, garbage that has been sitting in the basement of an old Lutheran church for several decades is not improved by the addition of water. Nobody has ever opened a bag containing moldy paperwork, old books and miscellaneous church debris, poured several gallons of rainwater into it and said, "There. Much better."

The city of Pecatonica took one look at the situation and declined to take the garbage.

It would have to be rebagged.

And this was the moment when the universe stopped being subtle.

I had grown up listening to "Alice's Restaurant." I knew exactly what happened when Arlo Guthrie had to get rid of the garbage from Alice's church. I had been aware of the parallels from the first time I walked into Jenny's church. But up until this point, they had been cute.

Now I was being sent back to a church to deal with a municipal garbage problem.

There are billions of people on Earth. Most of them will live their entire lives without having this experience.

I drove back to Pecatonica, bought industrial garbage bags, and spent about half a day taking decades' worth of rain-soaked, moldy Lutheran garbage and putting it into new bags so the city would agree to haul it away.

No police officers arrived. I was not arrested. There were no aerial photographs. There were no twenty-seven eight-by-ten color glossy photographs with circles and arrows. Nobody asked me whether I had rehabilitated myself.

I just rebagged the garbage.

Eventually the city took it away.

As far as I know, this leaves Arlo Guthrie and me as two of the very few people in American history who have found themselves involved in a complicated garbage-disposal situation arising from an old church occupied by unconventional people, with the added coincidence that both situations somehow involved children's books.

Arlo got a song and a movie out of his.

I got Atrocious Poems A to Z.

Jenny spent the next two years in Houston. When she returned, we began our life together. So unlike the movie, this wasn't the end of anything. It was the beginning. But before any of that could happen, the garbage had to be picked up.

And apparently, if you live in an old church, there's only one kind of person you should call when that happens.

Arlo Guthrie wasn't available.

Review of Vanished Roads By Conrad Sienkiewicz

 Review of Vanished Roads By Conrad Sienkiewicz

“Vanished Roads” by Thomas L. Vaultonburg is a fantastic collection of just over 100 haiku. Many are in the traditional format of 5-7-5, yet those with fewer syllables really show off Vaultonburg’s skill in doing more with less. Some of his haiku have only four words, yet the mark they make upon the reader is palpable. What Vaultonburg can do with merely four words is impressive and enviable!

Buy Vanished Roads From Wolf Twin Books

Some haiku in this collection are humorous, while others are more somber and reflective. All show a keen eye for nature and an appreciation of life in all forms.

Through his poetry and his fine skill with words, Vaultonburg gives us a magical world, where hats become pilgrims, coyotes deliver sermons, furniture grows teeth, and buckets carry stars.

Vaultonburg’s best efforts can comfortably rest alongside those of other haiku masters, such as Basho and Issa. His haiku “ripe figs” recalls William Carlos Williams’ icebox plums.

Read altogether, the poems feel like a hike through the woods, with occasional stops in more civilized environs. The simple illustrations by Tré that pepper the book complement some of the poems without distracting us from the words.

Illustration "The Mountain Path" by Tré from page 81 of Vanished Roads.

You can also read Conrad's review at Goodreads

Five Haiku By Thomas L. Vaultonburg That Explain Prairie Zen

 

Five Haiku That Explain Prairie Zen

Prairie Zen is less a philosophy than a way of paying attention. It borrows something from Zen—the suspicion that the world does not require our explanations in order to be complete—but locates that attention in the ordinary landscapes of the Midwest: fields, roadsides, birds, weeds, creeks, farmyards, weather, abandoned things, and the small animals going about their business while human beings remain convinced everything is about us.

There are no mountaintop monasteries required. Prairie Zen can happen beside a drainage ditch or behind a grocery store. Its central gesture is decentering the self. Nature isn't scenery arranged for our contemplation, and it isn't obligated to become a metaphor for whatever we're feeling. The field doesn't need us. The bird doesn't know it has entered a poem. The world is already happening. The poet's job is sometimes simply to become quiet enough to notice it—and occasionally to recognize the comedy of having thought himself important in the first place.

These five haiku approach that idea from different directions.

1.

first frost—
I thank the field
for not needing me

This may be the most concise statement of Prairie Zen in the collection.

Human beings are accustomed to placing ourselves at the center of the landscape. We cultivate fields, name rivers, build roads through forests, and then speak as though the world has acquired meaning through our presence. This haiku reverses that relationship. The field's indifference becomes a gift.

There is liberation in discovering that the world doesn't require your supervision. Frost comes. Grass dies back. Seeds wait. Spring eventually returns. None of it asks whether we're ready.

Prairie Zen finds comfort rather than insult in that fact.

2.

wrong turn
right sunrise
and nothing to fix

The poem begins with one of the fundamental human assumptions: I have made a mistake. By the third line, the entire premise has disappeared.

The road may be wrong according to the itinerary, but the sunrise doesn't know that. The distinction between the correct road and the incorrect one exists entirely inside the traveler.

That is an important Prairie Zen idea. It doesn't mean that choices have no consequences or that direction never matters. It means that our categories—success, failure, progress, delay—aren't necessarily categories the world shares with us.

Sometimes the wrong road contains the right sunrise.

Nothing needs to be repaired.

3.

beetle crossing—
I slow my whole life
to match its pace

Here the hierarchy between observer and observed collapses.

Normally the beetle would be the insignificant thing. We are busy. We have somewhere to go. The insect crossing our path is almost beneath notice. Instead, the speaker accepts the beetle's measurement of time.

For several seconds, the beetle determines the speed of the universe.

That reversal is quintessential Prairie Zen. Attention makes the supposedly small world enormous. The poem doesn't ask the beetle to teach a lesson. It doesn't turn the beetle into a symbol. The speaker simply agrees to inhabit its pace.

The encounter changes the person, not the beetle.

4.

empty basket—
carrying home
the birdsong

Prairie Zen repeatedly questions what it means to possess something. Here, materially, the speaker returns with nothing. The basket is empty. Yet the journey has hardly been unproductive.

This is abundance without acquisition.

You cannot put birdsong in a basket. You cannot keep it, sell it, preserve it, or prove that you possessed it. You can only have been present when it happened.

That distinction matters. Prairie Zen isn't an argument against the material world; it is an argument for noticing how much of our lives consists of things that cannot become property: weather, light, birdsong, silence, companionship, a particular afternoon.

The empty basket comes home full.

5.

old monastery—
a fox sleeping
through enlightenment

And this is where Prairie Zen reveals that it is willing to laugh at Zen itself.

Human beings construct monasteries, develop doctrines, write books, meditate for decades, debate enlightenment—and somewhere nearby a fox goes to sleep.

Perhaps the fox has missed enlightenment.

Perhaps the fox has understood it perfectly.

The poem wisely refuses to decide.

That humor is essential to Prairie Zen because taking one's own spirituality too seriously is another way of putting the self back at the center of everything. The fox doesn't need a philosophy explaining how to be a fox. It doesn't need to transcend its foxhood. It sleeps.

Meanwhile, we're still inside the monastery trying to figure things out.

The Prairie Is Already Doing It

Taken together, these poems suggest what I mean by Prairie Zen. It isn't a doctrine and shouldn't become one. There are no commandments, membership requirements, or correct interpretations. It is closer to a habit of attention: notice what is actually happening before deciding what it means.

A field doesn't need you. A wrong turn can be sufficient. A beetle can determine the pace. An empty basket can contain birdsong. A sleeping fox may know something the monastery doesn't.

The landscape doesn't promise enlightenment.

It offers something better.

It keeps happening.

Say Yes To the Sunlight When It Finds You

People occasionally ask if Vanished Roads is autobiographical. The answer is yes, but probably not in the way they mean. There isn't a poem in the book that says, "Here is exactly what happened." If that's what you're looking for, you won't find it. Haiku isn't particularly interested in autobiography. It notices a moment, then another, and leaves the reader to discover the road between them. Looking back, I suppose that's exactly how healing happened too.

Around the time the pandemic arrived, my own life became unexpectedly small. Not because of lockdowns. That was happening to everyone. Mine had already begun shrinking. Relationships ended. The future I thought I was walking toward simply wasn't there anymore. There were health concerns, disappointments, and losses that no longer seem especially important to recount in detail. Some stories become less interesting with time. What remains interesting is what they made possible.

For a while I honestly believed my best work was behind me. That wasn't self-pity so much as simple arithmetic. You add enough disappointments together and eventually you stop expecting the next morning to be much different from the last one. I wasn't looking for inspiration. I was simply trying to make it through another ordinary day without giving too much thought to what had disappeared.

The surprising thing is that life rarely changes all at once. It changes because one afternoon you decide to go for a walk instead of staying inside. It changes because someone places a book in your hands. It changes because you notice a bird you've passed a hundred times before and, for reasons you can't explain, this time you actually stop to watch it. Those tiny moments don't feel important while they're happening, but they have a habit of accumulating.

Somewhere during those years I found Zen, or perhaps Zen found me. I don't mean enlightenment or serenity. I mean something much simpler. I slowly stopped arguing with reality. I stopped measuring every new day against the one that had been taken from me. Zen never returned what I had lost, but it gradually convinced me that my happiness no longer depended on getting it back. That turned out to be a tremendous freedom.

The Midwest Zen of Thomas L. Vaultonburg

 Midwest Zen

The Midwest has always suffered from an image problem. It is described as flyover country by people who have flown over it, empty by those who never stopped walking, ordinary by observers who mistake quiet for the absence of depth. I have lived here long enough to know better.

There is a particular kind of stillness that belongs to this region, and it differs from the landscapes that advertise themselves. It lives in long horizons, abandoned rail lines, river fog, weathered barns, neighborhood alleys, floodplains, factory walls overtaken by vines, and conversations where silence often says more than words. If Zen is the practice of paying attention to reality exactly as it is, then the Midwest has been practicing it for generations. No one simply thought to call it that.

My own writing has never tried to escape this geography. If anything, it has spent decades returning to it. Again and again I find myself drawn back to the Rock River, restored prairie, forgotten county roads, industrial edges, Hall Creek cutting through ancient stone, migrating birds, and snow settling onto places where yesterday's arguments no longer matter. Over time I realized I wasn't merely writing about these places. They were shaping the way I looked at the world. The landscape itself had become the discipline.

The haiku arrived naturally because the place was already speaking in brief moments. A bird announcing itself after a diagnosis. Goldenrod reclaiming an abandoned lot without witnesses. Moonlight passing through every knot in an old barn. These moments resist spectacle. They refuse performance. They possess the quiet confidence of things that existed long before anyone thought to photograph them and will remain after we are gone. That, to me, is Midwest Zen.

This has nothing to do with nostalgia, nor is it an attempt to romanticize rural America. The Midwest carries its own burdens: economic decline, forgotten towns, empty storefronts, abandoned factories, difficult winters, and people who quietly continue despite them all. There is a kind of wisdom in that continuation. Not dramatic resilience, but ordinary endurance. It is easy to overlook because it seldom announces itself.

For years my work has moved toward smaller and smaller moments, not because the world became less interesting, but because my attention became more precise. The farther I walked into local landscapes, the less I felt compelled to search for extraordinary experiences somewhere else. The extraordinary had been waiting in familiar places all along. Rockford became enough. Southern Wisconsin became enough. The prairie became enough. A creek became enough. That realization is not provincial. It is liberating.

Much of American literature still assumes significance arrives from somewhere larger, louder, richer, or more famous. Midwest Zen begins from the opposite conviction. If we cannot discover meaning where we actually live, we are unlikely to discover it anywhere else.

Looking back across more than three decades of writing, I can see a pattern that was invisible while I was living it. I have spent much of my life publishing through small presses, documenting overlooked places, writing poems that ask readers to pause instead of accelerating past the ordinary. None of this began as a philosophy. It simply became one through repetition.

The work has always trusted quiet over noise, observation over declaration, presence over performance. Perhaps Midwest Zen is simply the name that pattern has been waiting for—not because I invented it, but because I have spent a lifetime listening for it.

Illustration from Vanished Roads by Tré

Buy Vanished Roads by Thomas L. Vaultonburg

Review of Vanished Roads By Melanie Medved

 Review of Vanished Roads By Melanie Medved

Buy 

I thought Thomas L. Vaultonburg's new collection of poems was going to stay with me for an afternoon, which is how long it took me to devour his latest publication, “Vanished Roads.” Instead, it's been lingering for two weeks now, in the way the first Autumn night air settles into your bones. It’s just sitting there, thick with emotional residue and meaning, while I struggle to succinctly put into words just how stellar the collection is.

Vaultonburg has been a favorite of mine for years. Following his literary career through everything from darker poetry to children's books and fiction, I've witnessed him move effortlessly between genres and forms. He has a strong ability to shapeshift as a writer, yet maintain his track record of consistent excellence in all genres. I was looking forward to his collection of haiku/short-form poetry, waiting to see if he could once again knock it out of the park. He has.

From the opening poem, which arrives not like a leaf drifting onto the page, but like a train waking you up in the night, Vaultonburg announces his poetic intention immediately— You’re going to feel something as you read these poems. The first three lines introduce a pattern he will use often throughout the book— most often staying true to the concept of traditional haiku using a central subject in nature (in this case, wind and bamboo) and adding a few perfectly chosen words to assign it an emotional impact (this time, human emotional frailty and ennui) that often jumps out at the reader with layers of meaning. He writes:

wind through bamboo

I too

Am hollow.

Then, after announcing himself and his arrival, without hesitation, he rolls up his sleeves and trudges off in old boots into the colorful territory: dawn, peonies, the evening rain, deer, wolf tracks and more. Quietly threading the beautiful natural landscapes we all encounter each day, with the fragile emotional territory of grief, regret, loneliness, and hope— one after the other, painting them together in a style that is somehow both bold and vivid and soft and gentle at the same time— Vaultonburg is like the Van Gogh of poetry.

Though his subjects are universally relatable, they are still deeply personal, as evident early on pages 8 and 9, when he writes about the passing of two family members in a way that made me ache with empathy and understanding. Those feelings accumulate with each page, and nearly every haiku hits hard. By the final page you’re sitting there with the wind knocked out of you, not by a hurricane, but by a light spring rain. The weight of his tiny gray book is difficult to shake, in the best possible ways.

A bonus is that it felt like a two-in-one book: poetry combined with Buddhist wisdom. Many writers try hard to “teach” lessons, and while Vaultonburg wasn’t even trying, he landed quite a few with ease:

bee in the window

I open it

for both of us

(page 30)

He has a subtle yet strong way of showing how our lives intersect with the natural world, and the impact each can have on the other. He saves a bee, and in doing so, he’s sparing a small piece of himself. Those everyday sadnesses of trapped bees lie in juxtaposition with hope and happiness on the pages. “Wheat fields ablaze with joy” and prairie winds that steal hats are felt just as strongly through his curated words. He writes of dharma and dragonflies opposite a page which encourages the reader to:

Ask the snow

to forgive you—

then leave no trail

Last but not least, another highlight are the illustrations by his writing partner Tré, whose tiny pen-and-ink style drawings show up at just the right time and place to add another beautiful layer to the already outstanding book. The two have proven they are a powerhouse before in their combined haiku/illustration book, “Moonscape,” and it is just as magical to see little glimpses of her art show up here in his solo volume.

In summary, this is truly some of the most recent memorable poetry I’ve experienced in years. After closing this book, I felt like I’d discovered something for the first time. My mind went back to third grade when I first read Carl Sandburg’s poem “Fog.” 40 years and thousands of poems later, it’s hard to recapture the joy that I felt in that classroom of my first favorite poem, and yet, Thomas Vaultonburg has handed me that joy again with “Vanished Roads.” His strict inventory of words, ability to capture single snapshots in time, and his ability to produce a book this wise without a single trace of pretention should be embraced and applauded by old and new fans of poetry alike.