Review: Kyle Vaughn
On The Alpinist Searches Lonely Places by Kyle Vaughn
by Tyler Truman Julian
The American Mid-South has produced its share of poets, but their work is perhaps underappreciated on a regional scale. Given the ecological and social concerns that plague our present moment—ever more complicated at the ecotone—ignoring the role of place in literature seems misguided. Cue Belle Point Press, “a new regional small press founded in 2021,” with a mission “to celebrate the literary culture and community of the American Mid-South: all its paradoxes and contradictions, all the ways it gets us home.” Their focus on the regional in its paradox and contradiction is timely and important—politically, ecologically, and socially. This specific attention to place, arguably, needs to be at the forefront of literary analysis and even our own writing for us to make sense of the present age. In fact, Leonard Lutwack in The Role of Place in Literature argues, “An increased sensitivity to place seems to be required, a sensitivity inspired by aesthetic as well as ecological values, imaginative as well as functional needs. In so far as the representation of place in literature has an important influence on how people regard individual places and the whole world as a place, it may be concluded that literature must now be seen in terms of the contemporary concern for survival.” Lutwack’s groundbreaking study on place and literature appeared in print clear back in 1984, but it seems all the more significant now. From Arkansas, Kyle Vaughn writes of his Mid-South home in The Alpinist Searches Lonely Places, but easily moves beyond its borders in the elegiac chapbook to explore environment, memory, and ultimately, transcendence. This chapbook not only explores the individual and the individual spaces and places that individual can occupy, but interrogates what Lutwack calls “the contemporary concern for survival.”
Kyle Vaughn’s poems take his reader to mountain tops and grassy plateaus, exploring philosophical questions of loss and metaphysics. Vaughn’s speaker asks, “And in any hard season, who / are you, are you one who will find / enough to live on in this world?” (“Blackland Prairie”). This question, central to the chapbook as a whole, connects the disparate threads of Vaughn’s poetry. Not only is the poem rooted in a specific place (Blackland Prairie, a large native tallgrass grassland in central Texas that has been 99.9% lost to other use), but it conflates the individual (a reflexive you, i.e. the speaker) with the vulnerable place. This is significant. Vaughn’s speaker is in nature. He is a part of nature. Vaughn comes by this honestly, developing setting and a personal story in tandem throughout the chapbook. Initially, the speaker is lost, bereft even, mourning a beloved. In “Lonely Traveler,” Vaughn writes,
Anywhere I’ve roamed was never far enough
to find myself. Cathedral, citadel, temple in which
no animal may be harmed. Old mountain lodge, petrified
forest, cold dunes. Always I set out to make it
all the way around, get to some unlonely heaven on
the other side of things. Only found the solitary
trails…And always my silence
is an apology, a penance for carrying my worry to
so many places.
The searching never ends for Vaughn’s speaker. The mourning never ends. For our speaker, “ghosts // bloom from any absence” (“The Alpinist Searches Lonely Places”). Yet, as the poems progress, as he moves through time, the speaker’s understanding of grief and spirituality shift. He gains a clearer understanding of who he is across the poems and describes how his wandering search has been a result of his grief for his lost love, not a pursuit of some intangible transcendence: “Up western summit to go further out / from grieving…I went up but didn’t rise” (“November, Sol Duc Falls Trail”). Vaughn’s speaker is rooted to the earth, he doesn’t rise; therefore, he is only human, only one part of the greater-than-human world. This realization seems to reinforce the challenge of literature to interrogate why we engage with place—why attention to place and our position in nature is not only a concern for survival but a way of coming home. Lutwack’s work explores the metaphorical relationship of place in literature and how place and character and even reader share a dynamic relationship. The Alpinist Shearches Lonely Places embodies this dynamism. Vaughn’s speaker travels across the country, literally up and down mountains, to understand his grief and return home with a sense of peace. In “Leaving My Desires at the Sol Duc River,” the speaker transitions into this peace, explaining,
I carried your image to an old growth forest.
you will never love me. My life’s meaning
is to be present for the first snow. To be
subsumed by winter, wardened by
evergreen. To set out as landscape
my heart through which timber fell.
As showcased here, the metaphysical and spiritual moments in Vaughn’s work are tempered by a deeply human voice and a speaker unafraid of vulnerability. As a result, the poems in The Alpinist Searches Lonely Places are not only accessible, but they create a compelling grief narrative that satisfies Lutwack’s goals of writing about place, personalizing the drama of humanity’s place in nature.
Kyle Vaughn’s The Alpinist Searches Lonely Places is a chapbook, for all its breadth, that centers around the personal desire to find your center. For Vaughn’s speaker that center is in and through grief and nature. Much can be learned in these pages about the feelings, ideas and places wrapped up in the word home.