After planting trees for six years, Robert MacLean published his fifth volume of poetry, In a Canvas Tent (Sono Nis, 1984), about his experiences in the woods at Port Eliza, Queen Charlotte Islands, Kitwanga, Nass River, Slave Lake and Haines Creek. Born in Nova Scotia in 1948, he wrote his M.A. thesis at the University of New Brunswick on Henry David Thoreau and received his Ph.D from the University of Edinburgh for his study of William Blake. He lived in Kyoto for twenty-five years, where he taught at Ritsumeikan University, meanwhile continuing his lifelong zazen practice. He has studied and sat with Robert Aitken Roshi and Joshu Sasaki Roshi, and latterly at Tofukuji in Kyoto, where Keido Fukushima Roshi was abbot. He now lives in the North Okanagan.

In 2020, MacLean published the collection of poems, Waking to Snow (Isobar $19.95) that tracks his life in Kyoto, Japan. 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 sequence of eighteen poems describing the anguish of a stillbirth.

BOOKS:

Waking to Snow (Isobar Press 2020) $19.95 978-4907359331

In a Canvas Tent (Sono Nis, 1984) 978-0919203273

[BCBW 2020] "Poetry" "Forestry"