Robert MacLean

Waking to Snow Robert MacLean

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.