Robert MacLean

In Wintermoon Robert MacLean distils twenty-five years of living in Kyoto, Japan, into a single seasonal cycle seen through the radically minimalist lens of haiku.

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.

"The trouble with honest people is that they're cowards."-VoltaireThis book makes fun of politicians and their sexual peculiarities. It makes fun of certain presidents, vice presidents and secretaries of state. It makes fun of women. It makes fun of gays. It makes fun of Americans. It makes fun of blacks, Hispanics, rednecks and bible-thumpers. It makes fun of Canadians, Russians, Brits and Frenchies. It makes fun of Africans, it makes fun of Asians, it makes fun of Latinos. It's a lot of fun. "Belly laughs Really Good "-Theater/Film/Book-Critique"Un-put-downable fun "-Winslow"Had me laughing so much that I now want him to be my Palm Reader."-Gail James"This is a fun book to read."-M. Brandt"He's made a few interesting films, and written some fine plays, but fiction is where he started, and he's very good at it."-Collector GuyCover by Peter Ratcliffe