Poems that gaze and listen:
What is stillness?
Can you hold emptiness?
Waking to Snow by Robert MacLean tracks twenty-five years of living in Kyoto. The poems are arranged roughly chronologically, in four sections, following the rhythms of the seasons, of Zen practice and sesshin retreats, along with poems about brief returns to Canada to visit aging parents, childhood memories, and academic and married life. Throughout, many poems attempt to decipher ‘the lost languages’ of nature: rice-seedlings, snails, chickadees, flowers, cicadas, heron, crickets, a bush warbler, an abandoned kitten, stars, trees, weather, wind, snow. At the very heart of the book is ‘Still’, a stunningly powerful sequence of eighteen poems describing the anguish of a stillbirth.
With these poems, Robert MacLean gives to those flashes of insight that arise in the interstices of the everyday a permanent home, replete with creaturely companionship and compassionate ardour. – Roo Borson, co-author of Box Kite: Prose Poems by Baziju
In Waking to Snow, Robert MacLean writes with the immediacy and refreshing directness of a life steeped in Zen. His poems are spacious even as they bring an intimate attention to their subjects, whether it be a visit to a fortune teller in Portland, Oregon; crickets – ‘wizened, black- / robed monks’ – chanting in Kyoto; or the unfathomable loss of a child in stillbirth. Each poem offers a striking illumination and a vivid reminder of the warmth and clarity we might bring to the ten thousand joys and sorrows of our own lives. Waking to Snow is a quietly dazzling book.—John Brehm, author of No Day at the Beach and The Dharma of Poetry
1 November 2020, 84 pages, 5.5 x 8.5 in / 216 x 140 mm, ISBN 978-4-907359-33-1
Gregory Dunne has written an atmospheric review of Robert MacLean’s Waking to Snow for Kyoto Journal. It begins: “This is a subtle and elegant book of poetry. The poems fall upon the reader’s ear nearly as quietly as snow upon a pine bough at night. And similar to snowfall, the poems build and accumulate over time to transform the landscape before the mind’s eye, individual poems contributing to a story of journey, love, hardships, and continuance.” The full review is in the current (online) issue of Kyoto Journal.
In April 2021 the acclaimed Canadian poet Lorna Crozier chose Robert MacLean’s Waking to Snow as one of her three Poetry Picks for Canada’s 23rd National Poetry Month, praising the ‘beautiful minimalism’ of the poems. Click here to visit the Friends of Canadian Broadcasting page to read her recommendation.
Click here to read excerpts from Waking to Snow.
Click here to buy from Amazon in Japan, here for Amazon in Canada, here for Amazon in the US, and here for Amazon in the UK.