Isobar Press is not only a specialist publisher of poetry, but of poetry with a Japanese connection in particular. According to its website, it “publishes poetry in English by Japanese and non-Japanese authors who live (or have lived) in Japan, or who write on Japan-related themes.”

One of their recent publications is by former resident Robert MacLean, and here is the blurb…

“Waking to Snow by Robert MacLean 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.”

Isobar and Robert MacLean have kindly given permission to post here one of the poems in its entirety, and I think those of us who love Kyoto will readily relate to dog-walking along the Kamogawa.

My First Guide to Kyoto

Next-door neighbour’s
pug-nosed Sakura
tied up all day
whimpering beneath
the stairwell: no
way to treat the
earliest cherry blossoms

in Kyoto.
So I take him for a walk –
rather he takes me,
charging like a stunted
rogue elephant
to the Kamo river’s
ecstasy of in-

visible smells where
he poops three times, each
with more strain,
panting and slobbering as
he drags me along
at the end of his
taut leash. Oh

we’re sailing now
past some thin old folk
playing a kind of croquet
near the bridge in the ancient
newborn sun,
past some kids crouched
bouncing a ball and chanting,

past endless blocks of
jumbled houses,
blue-tiled roofs glinting
like dragon scales. By now,
Sakura’s zonked, able
to scrawl his faint
signature only at irresistible

spots, so we wend
our way home:
small dun dopey boggle-eyed
dog with fur
radiating in tufts,
deep gaze thank you
to each other.