Applause for a Cloud

Sayumi Kamakura’s Applause for a Cloud uses the haiku form to attend to everyday life with a cosmological acuteness, invoking wonder on macro and micro scales.

Sayumi Kamakura juxtaposes a surreal dailiness with a cosmological acuteness, invoking wonder on macro and micro scales. The paradoxical frictions in her work resolve into moments of lucidity just as often as they perplex. Although she writes in the haiku tradition, her poems detour from the conventional parameters for haiku, such as syllabic restrictions and a fixed seasonal reference. Her flexible approach to the long-standing form allows her to explore new emotional frequencies across a range of subject matter. The book’s four sections—everyday life in Japan, experiences in Morocco and Italy, her husband’s cancer diagnosis, and reflections on the pandemic—reveal the preoccupations of a poet invested in rendering her experiences with a mix of traditional and contemporary motifs alongside a subtle wit. The natural world is always close at hand, yet Kamakura does not merely depict phenomena. She creates moments of stillness that usher the reader into her inner world.

Sayumi Kamakura is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Moisture, Cross in the Water, From the Skylight, La La La Goes the Sea, and The Collected Haiku of Sayumi Kamakura. Her work has appeared in dozens of anthologies in Japan and overseas, and she is the only haiku poet featured in Japanese Women Poets: An Anthology edited by Hiroaki Sato. She is the recipient of the Oki Sango Prize, Modern Haiku Association Prize, and the Azsacra International Poetry Award.

James Shea is the author of two poetry collections, The Lost Novel and Star in the Eye, both from Fence Books. He has received grants from the Fulbright US Scholar Program, Hong Kong Arts Development Council, National Endowment for the Arts, and Vermont Arts Council. He is coeditor of The Routledge Global Haiku Reader and cotranslator of Moving a Stone: Selected Poems of Yam Gong.