Overview

Poems that gaze and listen: What is stillness? Can you hold emptiness? Waking to Snow 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.

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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

Author Information

Born in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Robert MacLean has published five books of poetry. A former tree planter with a doctorate on Blake from the University of Edinburgh and long experience in Zen, he lived in Kyoto, Japan, for twenty-five years, teaching at Ritsumeikan University. He now lives in the North Okanagan, British Columbia.

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