Detours is a poet’s memoir, serving as a record of Paul Vangelisti’s witnessing of several West Coast scenes ebb and flow over several decades, like a river, like an ocean. At high tide, there are recollections of the commingling of many different scenes as they converge where poetry is circulating, and where Vangelisti is drawn in. At low tide, narrative conventions give way to verse that reveals poetry as a fact of Vangelisti’s life, true alongside other facts and details that situate friends, lovers, accomplices and the like. By the end, this memoir invites us all to join in to “face the music and dance.”

Patterns, sounds, weaves morph, like the collective behaviour you see in murmurations of sparrows, where massed in flight together the flock shape-shifts and a new form emerges. They pose a new challenge to the flow of memory and its narrative configurations, where time is replaced by a connected sequence of frozen moments. What we mean by ‘right now’ is a mysterious thing which we cannot define and we cannot affect, but it can affect us later, or we could have affected it if we had done something far enough in the past. All that we had previously judged to be continuous turned out instead to be discrete, and the fragmentary scenes that haunt my memories are obsessive in character. There is neither a past nor a future, at least, not for me, just as a smoothly continuous linen sheet is an illusion created by its finely interwoven threads of flax or cotton. And so I thought, I will take the thread everywhere I can.

David Lloyd,
from The Event of a Thread