Moonscape: A Year of Haiku Under the Same Moon

MOONSCAPE HAIKU PHASE I is the first of three collaborations in Thomas L. Vaultonburg and Tré's “SCAPE TRILOGY” series, but the book began with something much simpler: two longtime friends, separated by distance, looking at the same moon.

For one year, we wrote.

The idea behind Moonscape was to create a series of paired haiku moving through the calendar and the phases and mythology of the moon. One poem would encounter another poem. One imagination would answer another. Tré then created the illustrations that transformed those exchanges into their own strange visual landscape.

The result was Moonscape: Haiku Phase I, published by Wolf Twin Books in 2022.

The book moves chronologically from January through December. It begins with “Wolf Moon / Ōkami Lune”, travels through Snow Moon, Worm Moon, Pink Moon, Flower Moon, Strawberry Moon, Hunter's Moon, Beaver Moon, Cold Moon and dozens of stranger places in between.

There are coyotes and ravens. Wolves and dragonflies. Robots and black holes. Koi, ocelots, resurrection lilies, vampires, shadows, carnival rides and lost socks.

In other words, eventually we wandered pretty far from the moon.

But we always found our way back.

That wandering became part of the point.

Moonscape isn't really a collection of two people attempting to write traditional nature haiku side by side. The moon provides the gravity, but the poems are allowed to orbit wherever they want. Pop culture enters. Science enters. Buddhism and mythology enter. Friendship enters. So do jokes, memories, animals, monsters and whatever else happened to cross our paths during the year.

The visual world of the book developed the same way.

Tré's illustrations use bold blacks, whites and velvety fields of gray to create what we described as massurreal landscapes—places that seem simultaneously familiar and impossible. Some are playful. Others are eerie. Some feel almost like images recovered from dreams. Across the book, the poems and pictures begin functioning less as separate elements than as parts of one continuing conversation.

And conversation really is the key to Moonscape.

One of my favorite things about the book is that neither poet is simply illustrating what the other has already said. The pairings can agree, contradict, tease, echo or wander away from one another entirely. Sometimes the connection is obvious. Sometimes the reader has to find it.

That was intentional.

In the book's three-part dedication and acknowledgment, we thanked the moon itself—humanity's first timepiece and one of its oldest sources of inspiration. We also acknowledged the Japanese poet Yone Noguchi, who more than a century ago challenged American poets:

“Pray, you try Japanese Hokku (Haiku), my American poets!”

We did.

Not by attempting to impersonate poets from another century, but by seeing what two contemporary American poets could make from the form in their own time, with their own lives, obsessions, humor and friendship.

The third part of the dedication probably explains the book better than anything else:

“In the end, Moonscape is a love letter of enduring friendship.”

That's what it became.

A year-long record of two people noticing things and sending those observations back and forth.

A celebratory journal.

A playground of words and pictures.

And a reminder that friendship doesn't necessarily require two people to occupy the same physical landscape.

Sometimes it only requires them to look up.

MOONSCAPE HAIKU PHASE I
Thomas L. Vaultonburg & Tré
Cover design and illustrations by Tré
Wolf Twin Books, 2022
ISBN: 979-8-218-04516-6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022914098

Moonscape is the first volume of Thomas & Tré's SCAPE TRILOGY.