Weather, Rob Taylor
Gaspereau, 2024
Rob Taylor’s new collection of poems, titled simply as Weather, roots itself firmly in the earth of the pandemic lockdowns. During that time, while living with his wife and two young children in a small, two-bedroom apartment, Taylor would often venture out into the nearby woods of Port Moody’s Shoreline Trail on Burrard Inlet with a camping chair. There, he would come to “find pockets of quiet” to work on editing projects, but also to work on writing haiku that captured the strangeness of that time in human history. I find Taylor’s choice of poetic form very interesting because the lockdowns of the pandemic were often periods of time when words couldn’t really manage to convey the internal (and external) upset we all experienced. In the footsteps of haiku masters like Basho and Issa, too, Taylor also acknowledges that it was his goal, in writing the poems, “to include not one unnecessary syllable.” The precision of his word choice and phrasing makes the poems seem like tiny meditative pieces that might lead a reader to respite, and maybe even to enlightenment, too.
Weather begins with images of birth, even while the poet alludes to his father’s death when he himself was just eleven. Taylor situates himself as a father without a living father, but is also suggesting to the reader that there are cycles in the natural world that can bring comfort even as we grieve our individual and collective losses. He begins with mention of labour and birth, writing of the “rinsing and rinsing/matted birth from her hair—/my wide-eyed daughter.” Caught in “mid-dream” the poet writes, “my father’s voice becomes/my daughter’s cry.” Even while life events occur, when he faces a “restless night…driving my step-father/to Emergency,” there is the mention of “the surface of the moon” and the way in which “a crow at the window/bends the tip/of a four-storey tree.” Faced with her worry for a friend who has been diagnosed with “stage four,” the poet’s wife is “up late tonight/scrubbing pots.” Then, there are the late nights, as the poet is “springing/from my warm bed—/the hospital’s call.” The thing in Weather that feels undeniably true is that Taylor documents life’s happenings—the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ as we so often narrowly qualify and categorize them—while reminding readers that we can find respite in the moments that offer us beauty or wonder as flashes of necessary distraction and welcome comfort in difficult times.
Early on in this series of poems, “a great blue heron/snatches hatchery smelts—/afternoon rain,” and carries on to appear again in “The Creek,” as “the father of two/watches/the heron” while “the heron/watches/the water” to track “imagined/minnows” that pass beneath the surface of the water. One watches the other while “the baby writhes/silently/in her carrier.” There’s a chain of being happening here, and it all finds its origin in the need to observe carefully and then document the images as moments of cameo-etched beauty.
Taylor also includes free verse poems alongside the haiku, and pieces like “The Mountain” continually show the contrast between the pandemic lockdown world and the natural one. There are the mountains that “birth bears” as humans “shoot them/or shoo them away,” while “one hundred crows/burst from the tree line/over the inlet,” and “in every stream/salmon” are “breaking open” the water. While the world got very still during lockdown, the activity of the natural world continued, oblivious to human activity. Birds seemed louder in their conversations, and the running water of streams and rivers felt more present, somehow less obscured. In that natural world, the one that is so often dampened and muffled by our excessive human noise, many of us found respite during lockdown times. Taylor’s time spent writing and editing in the woods, or along the stream or inlet, is about being able to take deep breaths during a time when that often seemed a hard thing to do.
Creatures of all sorts make appearances throughout Weather—from herons, to eagles, crows, wasps, mosquitoes, bears, bats, fish, to neighbourhood dogs on walks with their respective humans. All the creatures stay busy with their own work and aren’t at all distracted or phased by news reports or government updates of any virus or vaccine. In “Fledgling Count,” the poet witnesses a juvenile eagle that has “discovered/the heron nests,” but also mentions that the young bird is “Alone/untrained” and so “it stumbled//killed few/left hungry.” Time’s passage, too, is marked by the ways in which the trees change through the year, and by the poet’s mention of snow’s arrival. The pandemic was a time without time, and one some don’t want to recall, but Taylor does a brilliant job of catching the nebulousness of it all in Weather, in capturing the watercolour, blurry uncertainty of what happened. Each of us had ‘our own pandemic,’ as people so often say in thoughtful conversation, but some of these remembrances—of finding comfort in being with the birds, trees, and animals—will likely seem familiar to most readers.
In Weather, readers will find a ribbon of haiku that offer painterly imagery that loops backwards and forwards as memories connect to observations of current happenings. There’s a comfort to this notion of continuity, of carrying on during challenging times, but also of remembering to be more still in our observations of what is going on in the world around us. While there can be chaos outside, if we can find that stillness inside—through the strength and elegance of beautifully crafted haiku, even—perhaps we will also find some solace and respite. Everything offers us a glimpse of wonder and beauty if we pay proper attention each day, and Taylor’s work—especially in these chaotic times—offers a few moments of peace.
