Guernica Editions

Travelling The Lost Highway collects the poetry James Deahl has written from 2011 to 2018. It contains themes such as the poet's responsibility to nature, the necessity and beauty of love, elegies, and the vulnerability, yet surprising resilience, of all life. Central to the book is a series twenty-two travel pieces, written off the grid of main highways in Canada and the United States, that display Deahl's affinity for the world outside the urban centres of wealth and power. Although not usually a political poet, the collection closes with a section of poems personally responding to the advent of President Donald Trump, an electoral result that, unlike most elections, changed everything.

But nothing is as tough as the body / continuing after life's surrender. / The overwintering blue jays and these / few returning cardinals can only fail / to breathe music into death's stillness. / We, the living, are never so innocent / as to fearlessly watch that casket down.

Reviews

• Gifts for the Journey: Travelling the Lost Highway
  Canadian Literature - October 7, 2020