HCSHR 6:17 - Robert MacLean, Wintermoon

Wintermoon by Robert MacLean. Tokyo and London: Isobar Press 2022. 978-4-907359-39-1. 84 pp., $CD9.06 (paper).

 

Review by Jennifer Harrison

 

This new collection of sparse, astute poems distils more than twenty-five years of Robert MacLean’s thinking about what is essential in poetry. It encompasses his many years teaching in Kyoto, Japan, though he now resides in British Columbia, Canada. MacLean’s mastery and innovative understanding of the haiku lens are immediately evident: one or two poems per page, simplicity of diction, each poem moving elegantly across the page, belying the intense contemplation of its conveyance through a language that is precise with unsaid evocation.

 

The book’s dedication to Yosa Buson (1716-84) reads as follows,

 

kangetsu ya     koishi no sawuru     kutsu no soko

winter moon     pebbles     beneath my shoe

 

This one-line poem singularly appears in Japanese (MacLean’s are written in English) but its placement as epigraph highlights the enterprise of the poems: to lay down a voice on paper that responds to the master’s challenge: how to understand the simplicity of a landscape’s shapes and elemental rhythms, how to carve away language from tradition to arrive at the meaning of such words as journey, breath and hearth. This human perspective (‘pebbles beneath my shoe’) introduces us to MacLean’s far-ranging concerns about life, love and writing. In his first poem, we find these words:

 

inbreath at the tip of my nostrils cool

outbreath warm

 

a poem that is the equivalent of breathing – respiration as essential as life itself. This, then, is a poet sitting zazen in a Kyoto temple for whom poetry is pure inhalation, exhalation. And here in the collection’s sixth poem (also quoted in its entirety):

 

fall inside yourself

until that word too

is gone

 

The excavation of language seems to bring the reader to a point of felt interiority as opposed to any cognitive experience of words and, perhaps, allows the reader to sense the poem as embodiment followed by absence. The poem remains in the world, however, as a trace on the page, and in the psyche.

Wintermoon is dedicated to the poet’s daughter, Akane, but these beautiful trace-poems also bring to life the almost inexpressible contours of losing an earlier stillborn child (see the section ‘January’):

 

lum

inous empti

ness

 

I recall the Oracle of Delphi’s instruction, ‘Know thyself’, and the long philosophical debate over authenticity in art. Existential perspectives aside, there is a timeless, grounded, observational handling of imagery that chooses to reach beyond religion and spirituality towards practicality, urbane knowledge of contemporary life, without losing any perspective of cosmological gravitas. In sculptured words, the poems seem effortless as though the poet has mined language for the essence of existence, even if this touches the void of impossible expression, as in the poem quoted above, where language ultimately falls short of being able to name experience. But isn’t this the very thing that such poetry wants us to know?

The poems are without punctuation, capitalisation, without haiku syllabic constraint, without distractions. The Japanese poet Tanikawa Shuntaro said recently in interview at the 47^th Japanese Foundation Awards, 2020, that after composing poems for over 70 years, he believed that the most important poetic is to listen to the world, ‘I think we need to be more careful with human linguistic communication skills . . . there aren’t many classes on speaking and listening’.

 

Wintermoon is, above all, about speaking and listening. In the section, ‘A Walk by the Kamo River’, for instance, we find startling poems of time, place and voice:

 

where the hermit lived 300 years ago

in the bamboo grove

still a space

 

and in the section ‘Three-Mat Room’:

 

my voice

a rusty knife

whittling these shavings

 

and

 

even though they seemed

to be listening

how quickly everyone leaves

 

The minute, small experiences of human temporality are spiked with nostalgia and enormous resilience. This edge of belonging/not belonging, resilience/vulnerability, is what I find particularly fresh and remarkable.

 

wind bell

icicles

my distant country

 

and more specifically in the section titled ‘Migrations’,

 

opening her eyes

you must be tired

then slipped away

 

MacLean creates vivid moments with very few words. Something about the ‘whittled’ language, the rightness of word choice, the tenderness and humour of these choices, create images and moments that are ever more poignant, and elegiac.

 

red dragonflies fuse mid-air

fierce embrace

was I ever so loved

 

and the final poem in the book:

 

am I light

enough

to follow

 

To follow whom? Buson? One’s departed parents? Oneself and the path that has been chosen for poetry? Or perhaps to be as light as the penultimate poem’s puffballs that ‘luff along’ following the wind as the poet moves from the Japanese archipelago to Canada’s most westernmost province. All of these and more? MacLean’s poems have created eddying questions, musings, ephemeral insights that are glimpsed through language, never with certainty, always with longing and a commitment to the search for meaning, relevance and above all ‘voice’. Voice is the subterranean theme of this collection. Is it necessary to speak? What is the best vessel to carry voice?  How does speaking relate to the true experiences of a life? How does a poetic trace carry the moment, and last?

 

MacLean has said of Wintermoon that ‘touching any single poem wakens sympathetic vibrations from other poems throughout the entire work’ (personal communication), indicating that the collection is best read as a single poem, a sequence of discovery, and it’s true that the work holds together as a kind of journeying through contemplation. Uniquely, the poems bring together Christian and Buddhist spiritual traditions to forge remarkable and intriguing new proprioceptive forms. In her 1996 Nobel Prize address, the Polish poet, Wisława Szymborska, noted,  

 

Poets, if they’re genuine, must also keep repeating “I don’t know.” Each poem marks an effort to answer this statement, but as soon as the final period hits the page, the poet begins to hesitate, starts to realize that this particular answer was pure makeshift that’s absolutely inadequate to boot.

 

There are no full stops in MacLean’s poems, but Wintermoon reminds me of this wisdom, of the poet’s optimistic tussle with language and space, with the authenticity (and energy) of the great ‘I don’t know’ that seems to permeate these poems with such confidence, finesse, and grace.

 

Jennifer Harrison’s ninth poetry collection, Sideshow History, will be published in 2023. She chairs the World Psychiatry Association’s Section for Art and Psychiatry and received the 2012 Christopher Brennan Award for sustained contribution to Australian poetry.

Please also see Sandra Stephenson's review of Wintermoon from April 19, 2002.

 *****

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