HCSHR 8:5 – Weather

Title: Weather

Author: Rob Taylor

Publisher: Gaspereau Press

Publication Date: 2024

ISBN: 9781554472635 

Price $29.95

review by Pearl Pirie

Weather by Rob Taylor (Gaspereau Press, 2024) is barely backlist. I read it when it came out then put it on my best of year list. I’ve since reread it a few times and enjoy on each pass.

It seems I favour Rob Taylor books having read, The Other Side of Ourselves (Cormorant Books, 2011) which is lyric poetry. I missed The News (Gaspereau, 2016) but caught Strangers (Biblioasis, 2021) which has a few haiku such as this, p. 50

late summer walk

slanting my father's Issa

to catch streetlight

 

Weather by Rob Taylor (Gaspereau Press, 2024) doubles down on haiku and haiku-adjacent poems. it was a finalist for the 2025 Raymond Souster Award, Longlisted for the 2025 Fred Cogswell Award, was a Miramichi Reader Best Book of 2024 and a Tyee Summer Reads Pick for 2024 It was in my top list of books for 2024 so I gelt it was worth revisiting. (I wonder if it was entered for the Marianne Bluger Book and Chapbook Award? That shortlist and winner is to be announced May Long Weekend at Haiku Canada Weekend at Queens University.)

Since it is Gasperau Press, as an object, Weather is sublime with French flaps, elegant typeface, deep understanding of page and book design, lovely page that I hesistate to mark even with the lightest pencil touch.  Each section is titled with a blue matching the cover stock. 

The poems at often three per page are largely haiku and a few minimalist haiku-spirited ones. It feels humbler than haiku books that make each haiku stand alone on a large format page. (Is there ego in too much white space?) 

Taylor speaks to universal in specific terms. (p. 16)

mid-dream

my father’s voice becomes 

my daughter’s cry

How often does the unconscious fold in the outer world into the dream world, meld in its sleeping vigilance, then lets salient break through. And at the same time, there’s that suggestion of continuity of gene, how the parent becomes indiistinguishable from the grandchild, and even in role for the sandwich generation of caregivers. It works the layers but is not awkward to stretch within any of the layers. Watch what occurs on p. 25

the baby watches

the wasp on her hand

as the mother screams

The viewers eye is panned around. It isn’t strictly the poems zooming in or out in three stages of lines. You have a complete scene of seeing how focussed a baby can be. You have a light wobble of ambiguity of whose hand in L2. Then we widen to the reaction for just a moment and scene cuts before the vignette resolves. Does the clear-eyed baby echo mom’s fear? You have that contrast of baby’s lack of guile or context and the mother aware of all possible worst case scenarios. 

I love how in the poems he lets the reader unpack. He doesn’t explain out, he sets down. p. 41

coldest day of the year

ten herons

three beaks

From the first line, it could open in any direction. With herons the options winnow down to binocular vision. We have the water, climate, group of birds. Then the final line is a reveeal of posture, tucked like roosting chickens. So cold that the huge wingspans are in the smallest possible shape, except for a few. The guards, the just arrived perhaps. There is movement in stillness, in the unfolding, a folding smaller. It’s an intersting way to present the scene. 

There are moments of gentleness, ampleness, family, humour, an affable position to the world. He has a clear-eyed vision. Poems are not symbolic reads first but in and of the world. p. 74

just north of the fallen log

the frost shadow

of a fallen log

We have a hook in L1, and a refining hook in L2 that zooms closer, then the loop back, the repetition enacting the repeating lines in the forests, and the repeating time of morning when those ephemeral frost shadows stripe the ground. It gives a fair bit of poem envy for having seen the scene but never the grace in the scene before. 

Here is one of my favoruite haiku-adjacent one from the book.

Communion

I spend all morning

near the sparrow

through it is not

my father

and I am not

tiny cubes of bread.

It allows the reader to make the leaps. It gives permission to sit with whatever irreconcilables we need to sit with. It doesn’t have to make sense and yet intuitively it makes a kind of sense. 

There’s a sharp openness of observation, an attentiveness that acts as prayer, a response to holiness and this book has that centred attitude in abundance. p. 110

February heat wave—

woah

little buds

There’s a kind of daddy to the world in this, an affection with the double sense of little buddy, and little tree buds. And the same lack of control but love for what will happen. There’s a worldbuilding of whimsy and safety, reassurance that seems to come from deep, rather than patly saying something to emulate Issa. 

I’m sure you may choose many favoruites that resonate with you but I’ll leave you with a sample from p. 100

dusk—

the sun lingering

on my wedding ring

The emblematic value collating autumn and dusk and late life are called up here by the weight of a single word in the opening line. The astute dash says, don’t stop. There’s a connecting thing coming. So its getting dark but the sun isn’t extinguished. It has a volition to hang about longer. Where does this brightness loiter when its late? On the wedding ring. So even if marriage is long, it is not romantically over. Death of night may be coming swiftly, but still the bond is a reflective moon. 

Although reflective the poems don’t only come in interstitial spaces, but are keenly aware of time’s passage.  It speaks to being present for the sacred moments we are given.