Wintermoon

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. Here are 119 precise instants of focus, divided into eleven sequences - 'stepping stones / leading to / a waterfall'. Each set of poems arrives at an awareness different from the one with which the set began, and the book as a whole maps a transformative journey filled with Zen practice, loneliness, university teaching, questionings, cultural acclimation, intimate encounters with nature, romance and marriage, and the death of parents and of an unborn child. Each sequence is a record of a series of acute and vital perceptions of the world.