Kim Fahner : Weather, by Rob Taylor

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.

 

 

 

 

Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario. Her newest book, a novel, is The Donoghue Girl (Latitude 46, 2024). Her next book of poems, The Pollination Field, will be published by Turnstone Press in 2025. She recently won first place for her CNF essay, "What You Carry," in The Ampersand Review's 2024 essay contest. As well, Kim was named as a finalist for the 2023 Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize. She is the First Vice-Chair of The Writers' Union of Canada (2023-25), a member of the League of Canadian Poets, and a supporting member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada. She may be reached via her website at http://www.kimfahner.com

Kim Fahner : Strangers, by Rob Taylor

Strangers, Rob Taylor
Biblioasis, 2021

 

 

 

You can’t read Rob Taylor’s Strangers and not be aware of the poignant absences—and by virtue of that, the presences—that populate its pages. The poems are full of love and loss in a way that feels almost physically tangible. In the first poem in the collection, “Strangers,” Taylor writes of his father’s death: “I held his ashes/and wondered where to put them./And I waited for his return./I wait still, whatever sense it makes.” In the same poem, he speaks of reading a friend’s poems and realizing that, by doing so, “in this act I saw my father.” The dead who are beloved to us always visit, it seems, when we least expect them to. They work their way into our narratives—our lives.

In “Speak While Illuminated,” the poet writes of how he used to tap on the wall that separated his bedroom from his parents’ room. There is a shared, coded message that equates three knocks with ‘I love you,’ and one more is added in response from the other side of the wall for ‘too.’  As an adult, much later in life, Taylor writes of being stuck in a stalled elevator, and how he knocks three times on the door. “Four knocks ring back.//My waking mind falls silent, yields the floor./I am not a child anymore.” What parts, I wondered as I read this poem, do we cast aside as we grow into adults? We have still lost a parent, and so—deep inside—we are still very much childlike in our grief of their having died; we are forever our parents’ children.

There are common thematic threads that run through this collection of poems. The notion of story as something that belongs to one person, and then how that notion shapeshifts to include the other participants in the experience and memory, is explored in poems like “You ask me about my mother,” “Smoothing the Holy Surfaces,” and “Weather in Dublin.” These are just a few poems that are set off as tiny ripples to the pebble that Taylor gently tosses into the pond with the first poem in the book. In “You ask me about my mother,” a story that begins with a boy’s neck getting mistakenly caught in the closing trunk of a car is something that makes the poet laugh. His mother also laughs, “each time she hears me tell my story/which isn’t mine, of course, but hers—.” At what point does one’s story become shared, and then told by way of a different lens or perspective? An experience that is shared by two people, of course, will be differently perceived by those two. There is no one set story. In “Smoothing the Holy Surfaces,” another mishap occurs, and a boy with a banged head has grown into a man whose mother laughingly re-tells the story at parties. In hindsight, even difficult things sound funny, when you’re far enough out from the original date of injury, perhaps.

“Weather in Dublin” also speaks to the idea of how story is remembered, told, and transformed by the participant and by the teller, too. A tribute to Seamus Heaney, and specifically to the day of his death, has Taylor thinking about how the death of an influential poet has impacted his own life, how Heaney’s death marked a day, a breath, a moment, and an energetic shift. The first, second, and fourth stanzas are rooted in Vancouver, but the third is set in Dublin: “The night Heaney died it was morning in Dublin,/so what am I going on about? It was thirteen degrees/and partly cloudy. Visibility good, wind from the southwest.” In the final stanza, Taylor writes, “We will remember this morning forever, I am almost sorry to say.” Heaney’s death happened in Dublin, but his going rippled across the world, and poets who have been influenced by his work likely felt his departure as a sudden gust of wind moving through a tree’s leaves.

Taylor’s tribute to the Purdy A-Frame residency, “At Roblin Lake,” is one of the loveliest sections in the book. Taylor captures the physical and metaphorical landscape of Roblin Lake and Purdy’s cottage, exploring the idea of how place seeps into a person’s life, and into a poet’s work. There are the mice, the snow that “blusters in the entry” when someone opens the door, the “flock of terns” that “circle a flooded field,” the place where “the lake and trees” are busy “interlocking fingers,” and the last embers of an outdoor fire after it has been extinguished before bed. Here, then, is another ghost, but one whom Taylor acknowledges probably wouldn’t have liked him because “I don’t drink./I make nice./I stunt my opinions.” A visit to Al Purdy’s grave has the poet confessing: “If we’d met you wouldn’t have let me crash one night/in the loft. Now I’ve slept two months in your bed.” Sometimes ghosts haunt places where you can be still, outside of your own life for a while, and usher in new poems. Thankfully, these poems made it into Strangers, so readers can experience the essence of Roblin Lake without ever having been there.

The structure of Strangers is beautiful. Its title finds itself at the beginning and then at the very end of the collection, framing the poetry inside as if it were a painting. References to Mary Oliver, Heaney, Rainer Maria Rilke, Louise Gluck, Wallace Stevens, and Pablo Neruda weave Taylor’s work into an ancestral poetic web that finds itself rooted in the rhythms of the natural world, and in the way that we find ourselves relating to one another as humans. The poet places haiku pieces throughout, as way stations to mark shifts in content and focus. There are poems that speak to the loss of a father and brothers, but also pieces about marital love, and then poems about the loss of a mother as she declines.

Taylor’s mother struggles with a loss of language, in poignant poems like “On the Occasion of my Mother First Forgetting my Name,” “Diagnosis,” “Most days you still remember,” and “Reprieve.” At the same time as she struggles with dementia, and the loss of language and meaning, the poet’s son begins to experiment with words. In “Long Distance,” Taylor writes of an almost-three-year-old boy who moans for Elmo, his “vowels long slow animals/growing the miles.” In juxtaposition, the poet’s mother, in “Reprieve,” begins to lose words and meanings—“reaches back sometimes” in memory and language. Her life, she tells her son, is frequently more dream-like than a reality that feels fixed and certain.

The poetry in Strangers asks you to consider how memory works, and how stories are told and passed down through generations. Taylor’s poetry presents you with the unavoidable notion of how love and loss are nearly inseparable. This collection is stunning in its poignant intimacy, in how the poet opens the door to his readers, inviting them to listen to his stories, but also bravely nudging them to consider their own recollections of how memory and story are woven into one another.

   

 

 

Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario. She was poet laureate in Sudbury from 2016-18, and was the first woman appointed to the role. Kim's latest book of poems is These Wings (Pedlar Press, 2019). She's a member of the League of Canadian Poets, the Ontario representative of The Writers' Union of Canada (2020-22), and a supporting member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada. Kim can be reached via her author website at www.kimfahner.com

 

Rob Taylor

folio : Contemporary Haiku

 

 

          the baby gifts us
     silence and
          the sound of it

 

 

          mid-dream
     my father’s voice becomes
          my daughter’s cry

 

 

          another sunrise
     but I am awake
          for this one

  

 

I aim to follow in the tradition of Matsuo Bashō and Kobayashi Issa, poets who are vital to my writing practice (haiku and otherwise), while also acknowledging the language, ocean, centuries, and talented haiku poets between us. When it comes to form, I follow Bashō’s lead when he said “Even if you have three or four extra syllables, or even five or seven, you needn’t worry as long as it sounds right. But if even one syllable is stale in your mouth, give it all your attention.” (trans. Sam Hamill) In practice, that manifests in my using seventeen syllables as an unofficial “upper limit,” and ten or so as a lower limit. But my central formal goal is to include not one unnecessary syllable.

 

 

 

Rob Taylor is the author of three poetry collections, including The News (Gaspereau Press, 2016), which was a finalist for the 2017 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Rob is also the editor of What the Poets Are Doing: Canadian Poets in Conversation (Nightwood Editions, 2018) and guest editor of Best Canadian Poetry 2019 (Biblioasis, 2019). His fourth collection, Strangers, will be published by Biblioasis in Spring 2021. He lives with his family in Port Moody, BC.