The Wayfarer

Author: Cyrus Console

Publisher: Omnidawn Publishing (2024)

Poetic ballads that speak to a father’s quest to chronicle daily life amid times of collapse. Taking its name from part of a lost triptych by Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch, The Wayfarer documents its speaker’s attempt to forge a path through the world—both as a father and as an artist—and to adequately capture the experience of living through poetry. In language that melds the vernacular and the archival, these ballads recall moments of love as they arise in an everyday existence dominated by an awareness of political and ecological collapse. Caught between the terror of wandering and the awe of witnessing new minds as they acquire early words and memories, the poems hold out hope for the tenuous transmission of meaning between generations.