Weather by Rob Taylor

Rob Taylor’s poetry makes it easy to picture the poet writing from a camping chair in the woods, compelled to work outside of his small apartment during the COVID-19 pandemic while quarantined with his wife and two young children. In Weather’s afterword, he describes how he “waited in that quiet, that wind and birdsong, for haiku” and observed “the small moments out of which we assemble our lives.” Indeed, his haiku achieve startling glimpses into the minutiae of work and parenthood interspersed with nature. He masterfully navigates the confines of highly compressed poetry to bring the reader to a series of revelations, often astonishing and even heart-wrenching.

her friend’s stage four— 
my wife up late tonight 
scrubbing pots

In three lines, Taylor powerfully invokes an image of his distressed wife standing at the sink, channeling her pain into a mundane task of distraction.

Or of nature:

coldest day of the year 
ten herons 
three beaks

The reader is able to immediately envision seven cold herons with their beaks tucked away.

Or of parenthood:

my daughter’s delight 
watching cherry blossoms 
drift to the gutter

Another example of how the poet is able to zoom all the way in on a moment’s pause: his daughter’s joy; simultaneously paying homage to cherry blossoms oft-mentioned in older Japanese poetry and pairing both with the ephemeral nature of beauty, perhaps even parenthood itself.

Taylor’s appreciation for the haiku is unmistakeable in his skill and deeply informed by his research and influences. His acknowledgements mention some of the greatest Japanese haiku poets such as Bashō and Issa. It is clear that Weather achieves Taylor’s goal to “include not one unnecessary syllable” as these potent distillations of wonder, appreciation, joy and pain are structured in a way that assigns each word its own crucial job. Every word is delicately chosen as a necessary component, or as Taylor might put it:

August rain— 
every bulb 
of the blackberry

Taylor also addresses the experience of fatherhood while being fatherless—a theme that deeply affected me. In the afterword, Taylor describes losing his father at only eleven years old. Navigating fatherhood without a father is an experience I share with the author. The impact of this is apparent in his work, particularly in how he amplifies moments with his children, sometimes more directly:

fatherless 
watching my children prod 
the salmon carcass

Weather makes the most of such short musings. These poems urged me to continue cultivating an awe and respect for the art of the haiku. Perhaps the greatest gift a poet can give its reader is more than an appreciation for their work, but also for the craft. I spent my autumn researching, reading, and writing haiku poetry, inspired not only by Taylor’s writing but his reverence and respect of the poetry form itself. These poems declare that even in three or four seconds—as Taylor describes time with his late father—all that can happen. And all that did.

Rob Taylor is the author of five poetry collections: Weather, (Gaspereau Press, 2024), Strangers (Biblioasis, 2021), Oh Not So Great: Poems from the Depression Project (Leaf Press, 2017), The News (Gaspereau Press, 2016) and The Other Side of Ourselves (Cormorant Books, 2011).

Publisher: Gaspereau Press (May 6, 2024)
Paperback 8″ x 5″
ISBN: 9781554472635

Nicholas Selig

Editor-in-Chief

Nicholas Selig is a poet from Nova Scotia. His work has been featured by Contemporary Verse 2 and the League of Canadian Poets. He was awarded the Nova Writes Rita Joe Poetry prize in 2023. He is the current Editor-in-Chief for The Miramichi Reader.

Nicholas Selig

Leave a Comment Cancel reply