Robert MacLean was born in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada. He has an MA (University of New Brunswick) on Thoreau and a PhD (University of Edinburgh) on Blake. He published five books of poetry and two chapbooks in the 1970s and 1980s. His first sesshin (Zen retreat) was in London whilst working with Blake manuscripts at the British Museum, and during the next three decades he went on to sit with Robert Aitken Rōshi in Hawaii, Jōshū Sasaki Rōshi at Mt Baldy, CA, and at the Bodhi Mandala Zen Center in Jemez Springs, NM. He worked as a tree-planter in British Columbia for nine years, but, starting to get tendonitis, he returned to the academic world and moved to Japan, where he taught at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto. During his twenty-five years in Japan, he continued his zazen practice, sometimes at Tōfukuji, where Keidō Fukushima Rōshi was abbot. He now lives in the North Okanagan, BC, with a Renaissance viola da gamba, his wife Wakana, and ‘a luminous little girl Akane born on a snowy December morning, my resident Zen master.
In Books on Asia Robert has published a very warm review of On Haiku by Hiroaki Sato, an author/translator who has obviously been an important presence in Robert’s life. On Haiku, Robert says, is filled with jagged beauty. Throughout, what Sato calls his ‘meandering discourse’ is wonderfully erudite, playful and profound.… Again and again, Sato reveals how the radical brevity of the haiku genre contains worlds within worlds. This is a book to cherish, which nurtures in return. Click here to read the whole review.
Isobar books by Robert MacLean:
Comments on past publications:
Alden Nowlan on Selected Poems (Outland Press, 1977): Robert MacLean possesses every quality necessary to a true poet: sensitivity, intelligence, honesty, compassion, application and the urge to grow. He has written poems that I find both moving and meaningful and he deserves a larger audience.
Fred Cogswell on Selected Poems: Robert MacLean is the kind of poet who can seize and feel an idea of an essential simplicity – as all true religious ideas are. But the test of religious poetry is not thematic: it is, rather, the richness, the precision, the degree of imagination that the poet can bring to his theme without violating the essential integrity of experience. Robert MacLean, as this volume will richly demonstrate, has passed this test.
Dolores LaChapelle (author of Sacred Land Sacred Sex: Concerning Deep Ecology – and Celebrating Life) on Heartwood: These poems are essentially Taoist, not Buddhist, because there are no endings – only beginnings: thus no death but on-going life ever beginning anew.… In Robert MacLean’s poems we have the experience, unique in our culture, of neither opposing nature or trying to be in communion with nature, but of finding ourselves within nature.
