The salt scent of this ancient sea mingles with today’s aromas of sage and flaking limestone-or is it merely the salt of my own sweat that conjures this image? Suddenly, I can see it, or rather feel it: the vastness of water, the strange prehistoric fish hovering in the depths. Eroded cathedrals of banded rock-rust and ochre, sienna and ebony-stand silent in the rage of the sun. In 100-degree, “annihilating heat,” Beaudin, alone, scans the “arid landscape that was once the floor of a sea. He wants to confront life raw: he climbs a volcano into Zapatista (“rebel”) territory in Mexico wrestles with a wind-torn pup-tent in stormy Ireland makes an offering of sage and tobacco at Wounded Knee, South Dakota-site of the ignominious massacre of hundreds of Lakota tribal people by US Federal (i.e., imperialist) troops. The great Japanese poet, Basho, blended similarly in his 17 th-Century classic, Oku no Hosomichi (The Narrow Road to the Deep North.) Basho girded his feet and calves with thick straw, covered his head with a pointed, straw hat, and, with bamboo staff, headed north on Honshu Island, far from the refinements of Edo (Tokyo). The book leaves one hungry for more books by this author: his unique blending of prose and poetry. It is a book that may change the reader, deepen understanding, remain with one-a vade mecum of the soul-long after one has read it. And, “moonlight in the woodpulp of this page.” “Only connect,” Forster wrote, and this is a book about connections-to strangers on “blue highways,” stretching to the prairie’s endless horizon to kind, wise truckers on the soul-destroying maze of our Interstates to “angels” on a “chicken bus” in Guatemala and, encompassing all, to Nature: full moons over dark seas, ceiba trees in Copan birds carrying sunrise on their glowing wings.

Drunk on cervezas, ganga and poetry, Beaudin delivers travel journals that one wants to have lived– and re-live–with the author. It’s a book of dreams, and a book about how dreams come together on gossamer highways, and-stone by stone-on hardscrabble byways. One has to get the right grip on this book. “A poem is a mirror walking down a strange street.”-Lawrence Ferlinghetti “A tourist doesn’t know where he’s been and a traveler doesn’t know where he’s going.”-Paul Theroux

“I learn by going where I have to go.”-Theodore Roethke Elk River Books, Livingston, Montana, 2015. A Review of Vagabond Song: Neo-Haibun from the Peregrine Journals, by Marc Beaudin.

Only connect forster