HCSHR 5:04 – Robert MacLean, Wintermoon
HCSHR 5:04 – Robert MacLean, Wintermoon. Tokyo: Isobar Press, 2022. 978-4-907359-39-3. 84 pages. ¥2,052, $15US. isobarpress.com
review by Sandra Stephenson
In Robert MacLean’s haiku book, Wintermoon, I find principles of ikebana, 20o + 70o = 90o — "the old workman/ dozes/ sitting up”—plus the occasional (so western) perpendicular:
suit and necktie/ through/ the university gates
Parsimony is the ruling principle, and the effect of trying for it a sad beauty, a self-conscious delicacy. A Westerner working and practicing zazen in Japan, MacLean seeks erasure. If one wishes to “just throw self away” the angle at which one does it matters.
sun’s free fall/ arc/ to the horizon
At what angle, exactly, does reflection take shape? The angles from which tools hang in the shed, and the cat’s head tilts to listen to stones, these angles are arranged.
At some point of his or her life, a person listening intently absorbs and internalizes. Wintermoon is the absorption of Zen, of Japan, of dual identity
take back my name/ my fingers whisper
of multiple languages
what you were singing all along/ cricket
and of
“driftwood samadhi” which I see bleached by sun and sand, and arranged by the hand of man.
The poems are a detached arrangement of attachment, I would say a particularly western kind of Zen in which the practitioner is never quite sure about being good enough, while nature is sufficient unto itself. Here is continuation — “wings open and close”— still beating.
The element buoying these poems (and their author?) is wood, though the collection acknowledges water, space, stone and metal, as with a
rusty knife/ whittling these shavings
The meditator becomes a puffball “on archipelagoes of leaves”; the question of wood always is, am I strong enough, and in MacLean’s work, “am I light/ enough[.]” Proof of the response is not just through meditation, but through severest trials of living and dying. To discern these, the reader must pick up the book and read.
Sandra Stephenson
April, 2022
Please also see Jennifer Harrison’s review of Wintermoon from September 12, 2023.
*****
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