An Inside Passage

In these luminous essays on wanderlust, Caswell, an assistant professor of creative writing at Texas Tech University, embraces travel writer Bruce Chatwin's contention that walking is a poetic act that can cure the world of its ills. While the power of perambulation remains to be seen, the author's walks along the Ganges and in Idaho, New Mexico, Arizona, California and Japan do salve his restless soul. His travels culminate in a Death Valley vision that replaces his pervasive sense of dislocation with the answer to a question that has nagged him for years: what is home? Though a vivid connection with nature courses through the writing, Caswell also ruminates on a failed marriage's emotional turmoil, a bisexual friend's attraction to him, a grievous collision with a fawn, a promising student's tragic death and an encounter on a rugged Japanese mountain with a sage wild man—epiphanies recounted with unaffected honesty. The last essay takes the author to Fairbanks, Alaska, where he was born, and to the realization that his military father's transfer when he was five months old gave him “the bliss and rhythm of motion,” a bliss these revelatory essays vividly convey. (May)