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.
A spirit of retrospection lives in many of these poems, poems that honour, among many things, the virtues of nature, the tender aspects of human relationships, the joy of a new marriage, and the ghostly dignity of abandoned workers, factories, and towns.
Neil Querengesser, Canadian Literature
The landscape and its inhabitants are portrayed more like the accurate work of Canadian High Realist painters than the Group of Seven. There are meditations, eulogies and laments contained here, passionate love poems, poems that call upon national and generational history, and poems of political assessment. For Deahl, nature is the indifferent standard against which human activities can be compared, lauded, or found wanting. The forests renew “as if trees conferred redemption” even while “evil [is] transforming the face of the norm.”
David Haskins, Canadian Stories