SIX WALKS: IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF HENRY DAVID THOREAU BY BEN SHATTUCK

Ben Shattuck’s Six Walks: In the Footsteps of Henry David Thoreau is a love letter to New England’s natural world and the timeless revelations that walking in nature gives to us. Six Walks, crafted as travel essays, centers around Shattuck’s walks through New England, each one a retracing of Thoreau’s steps. Through Shattuck, the reader travels to the national seashore of Cape Cod, the highest summit in Maine, his family’s lost home in Rhode Island, and more. Pocked with pieces of Thoreau’s own writing, Six Walks recontextualizes Thoreau’s philosophies within our modern world.

After a few hours of reading Shattuck’s essays, I found myself setting an alarm for 5:45 a.m. to see the sunrise on my in-law’s farm. I painted a watercolor, taking inspiration from Shattuck’s own sketchings scattered throughout the book, and I journaled, copying lines from Shattuck, just as he had done with Thoreau.

In the essay titled “The Allagash: Nature Must Have Made a Thousand Revelations,” Shattuck finds himself camping on Pillsbury Island with his friend, John, and musing on the nature of friendship. There, he tells us about his friend Emily—a neuroscientist—and her beliefs on loss. She says, “souls don’t observe strict boundaries of ‘mine’ or ‘yours,’ but rather exist in an interconnected set of pattens that carry our essence forward, distributed across people and time,” and Shattuck remarks that he feels this with John: “He holds something that he isn’t aware that he’s holding.”

I think Shattuck holds a piece of Thoreau inside him, too. As I sat on the front porch of a farm, reading the last lines of Shattuck’s Six Walks, “the world around me was always there and waiting to be seen again when I was ready, and when I was ready, it looked only beautiful,” I felt that I held a piece of Shattuck, now, and Thoreau, too. Maybe if I’m lucky, they will hold pieces of me as well.

Tin House.

—Review by Caitlin Plante

GOD OF NOTHINGNESS BY MARK WUNDERLICH

Mark Wunderlich’s God of Nothingness is a folkloric investigation into death and its resounding implications on our humanity and significance.

Opening upon a poem about the various meanings of the speaker’s surname, the collection takes us through a generational tradition of grief and its echoes. He even suggests curse: “the wind speaks his strange name or worse— / voices recognition, an attribution, or a curse.” God of Nothingness’s speaker is a version of Wunderlich, existing in the plane with a “headstone, dateless, speckled with lichen”. Wunderlich is expansive, tremendous, and terrifying. He offers us a narrative that sunrises and sunsets on life’s most inevitable encounters.

Throughout the collection, Wunderlich takes us through elegies to both the long-dead and the recently passed, each raw and severely intimate. He writes to a lamb named Cuthbert, a cat, and even Lucie Brock-Broido. In “Elegy For A Hanged Man,” a poem dedicated to the poet’s nephew, he writes, “I know now that ghosts, indeed, exist / but they are not what you expect. / They are nothing but a mood you cannot shake— / the dust that dulls the edges of the mirror / to darken the bruise of the day.” He connects, not only to the pain of losing a loved one to suicide, but also to the depression that leads to this act, a haunting ache that lingers and dulls each day.

Wunderlich enters into archetypical tales as unvoiced characters. In his poem “The Beast of Bray Road” about an urban legend, Wunderlich speaks as the brother of the beast, a brother left behind: “I remained behind. Many seasons came and went, / our mother crumbled into an afterthought of dust, / my hidden world more hidden / as men forgot how to hunt. / I have seen the forest thicken, the sky warm / and change, birds arrive whose calls are foreign to my ear, / I do not know where my brother had gone / but I do know that he left me here / to prey upon myself alone.” In these lines, Wunderlich gives a disquieting portrait of grief: enduring, tedious, and utterly isolated.

This collection is endeared to the God of Nothingness, “who listens for a tremulous voice and comes rushing in / to sweep away the weak with icy, unmoving breath.” In light of this impending nothingness, Wunderlich asks us to consider, “does it matter that [we] lived, or that [we] died?”

Graywolf Press.

—Review by Caitlin Plante