As a follower of Brandi's work for years, I am excited for this new book, the first full-length collection in many years. Although in the opening poem Brandi expresses there's "Nothing to mark the way", the reader finds in these poems the sort of praise and grace that does just that. Because Brandi's road is open-ended and so full of discovery and richness, we, like the speaker in "Deep Motion Inside", can't help but realize "This vast, stretching impossibility is reachable." And reach, Brandi does: through poems that display wisdom that has been wrought from his many travels and the humans encountered on this earth that belongs to all of us...through nearly surreal poems that wrestle with "nights of anonymous desire", with letting "our hearts grow fierce in the wind", with the many other "yous". Herein are poems about writing, elegies, tributes to the living...all in all, a mighty book, a book to sink all of yourself into and emerge larger, enriched, fully named.

A Quest of Journey

-By Lucia de Vries

1998. Ko Pha Ngan, a small island off the Thai coast, 8 pm. On the beach a surreal scene unfolds. Tourists come out of their bamboo bungalows, and make themselves comfortable, facing the magnificent Gulf of Thailand. In front of them stands a tv set, provided by the guest house. The young Europeans, who travelled the seven seas to reach the East, spend the night watching a newly released Hollywood movie.

1999. Pokhara Lake side, 2 pm. In the estaurants visitors are engrossed in a Hollywood movie. No one speaks. Staff shovel through the rows of tourists to serve steaks, lasagna, pizza. The waiters, some of them old friends, have no time to talk.

We all like to believe we are travelers, not tourists. As a Belgium writer noted, tourists leave their home without the intention to change, while travellers set out on a transforming journey, a quest. However, in a world where most things beautiful and sacred have been colonised by tour operators, it is hard to find the time and ability to immerse in another culture, and to be changed by it. In order to do so, one either needs to leave the 'beaten track' and search for virgin land (keeping in mind that even Bhutan is connected to internet these days), or take the conventional tourist route, but travel at a slow pace, with a heightened perception, and a strong determination to connect with the original culture which runs like an underground stream in lands of concrete and steel.

The best travel writers are those that instill in us the sense of wonder and potential to change which we associate with traveling. John Brandi in 'A Question of Journey' shares with us the high ideals of a travel writer. After he mistakes monkeys for chanting monks in Boudhanath, Brandi asks, 'Why else travel? Except to live in life what we seek spontaneously underneath the skin: release, unity with mystery, marriage with the missing figure at our side, the rib from which we were born.' While traveling through India, Nepal, Thailand and Bali, Brandi does not leave the beaten trek. Like any other tourist he spends a day at the Taj Mahal, from his window observes concrete tourist bungalows in Jaisalmer, walks along the Ganges in Varanassi, and in Nepal rounds Annapurna. Still, Brandi in the preface offers his travelogue 'as a means toward transformation.' Brandi's strength is not to discover roads less travelled, but to let the noisy tour groups pass, to sit still, and to experience how tourists' voices are replaced by those of the place itself as well as his own.

Surprisingly, Brandi's own voice is not a personal one. Unlike Peter Matthiessen's, another writer whose travels are part of a life-long spiritual quest, Brandi does not reveal his past. We do not know where Brandi's need to travel stems from, apart from his childhood fascination with Annapurna, as well as the gifts his father brought home from a journey to Agra. We do not know what Brandi thinks of the people he meets on the way; they speak, but there is no interaction. It seems that if we want to travel with Brandi, we need to surrender to a faceless writer guide, who sets out to find nothing less than 'a new rapport between man and the universe, man and the void, man and himself.'

So off we go, contemplating our way across the Sub Continent. Brandi's beautiful descriptions help us to connect with a world of strangeness and indifference. 'Passing big belly Buddha, storm - wet and laughing.' His characters help too. There is the sweeper at Taj Mahal, whose sole duty is to remove pigeon droppings. He has time to talk to the visitor, thanks to a dead crow dangling from a nearby tree, scaring the pigeons away. Brandi introduces us to beggars, scores of them, chanting 'One baby hungry one chappati mama.' In Thailand, Brandi meets a Buddhist layman who tells him: '[E]specially when you travel and you have open eyes, there is always room to ask: '' What is the most important teaching I will take home with me?'''

And while Brandi ponders, and catches the sights and sounds in rapid staccato, our faceless poet guide returns to an earlier conclusion: 'If the world is so beautiful, why not be beautiful in it?' Brandi's world indeed is a beautiful one. It contains magic, contemplation, surprise, dreaming, laughter. What's more, there are plenty of children, acting, teasing, reminding us of who we really are.

In Brandi's world there are no tv sets nor skyscrapers. No mobile phone disturbs his quiet meditation. While Brandi continues his pilgrimage, a question comes to my mind: Could I travel in Brandi's footsteps without being diverted and saddened by the destruction of culture that marks the end of this century? Will I be able to trace his Shangri La, even if only in words, in which the heart of reality touches the heart of illusion?

Brandi points the way when he writes: 'Touch, be touched. Leave home, let the unpredictability of the road shake your beliefs. Find a new way back,along the way become someone else.'

(Lucia is a freelance writer living in Patan. She is presently preparing a book based on a pilgrimage which took her to Nepal and India.)

This is a very beautifully written book that captures the mystery and magic as well as the majesty, beauty and solitude of the high desert and of the souls who exist there. John Brandi combines a gifted writing style with a depth of undestanding of human nature, the high desert and the cultures who impact and are impacted by it. In addition John speaks with wisdom about Native American culture and the interaction with western culture from a spiritual perspective grounded in Buddhist sensibilities.

This is one of John Brandi's poetry collections, published fairly early in his career, that remains one of his most popular. Edward Abbey said of the work: "Good strong simple poems, quietly eloquent, shapely as snowflakes." Gary Snyder called this book "a guide to go where it says: "Back in." The poems certainly do point the way into a magical and remote hinterland, its Native American people, its starlit expanses and surreal outcrops. Brandi's forays into the desert hinterland known as "Four Corners" are balanced by some wonderful domestic poems: love poems; beautiful celebrations of family; tender poems to children. A classic collection, enahanced by a sampling of Brandi's whimsical illustrations, which he calls "word maps."