Traveling the Lost Highway
Travelling The Lost Highway contains themes central to James Deahl's poetry: 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. 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.
James Deahl was born in Pittsburgh in 1945, and grew up in that city as well as in and around the Laurel Highlands of the Appalachian Mountains. He moved to Canada in 1970 and holds Canadian citizenship. He is the author or editor of forty literary titles, recently his two prior collections from Guernica, Rooms the Wind Makes and Red Haws to Light the Field, as well as Tamaracks: Canadian poetry for the 21st century, the first major anthology of Canadian poetry published in the U.S. in three decades. He is the father of Sarah, Simone, and Shona, with whom he is translating the poetry of the Québécois poet Émile Nelligan. Deahl lives in Sarnia with companion Norma West Linder.
