Applause for a Cloud

"In his new translations of Sayumi Kamakura’s haiku, James Shea continues to capture the uniqueness of Kamakura’s sensibility. As changes in nature intersect with her personal life, Kamakura melds the traditional with the contemporary, often in surprising or moving ways.  When she anxiously waits for her husband’s operation to be completed, the wind also holds its breath.  When spring ends, she applies, in an attempt to counteract the sudden absence of color, lipstick to her mouth.  Nature can be beautiful, but it can also be tricky.  For instance, a rainbow, which doesn’t question its own existence, causes the poet to question hers.  On a visit to Paris, the poet uses nature to deftly deliver a critique on the consumption of art: “Sparrows chatting— / ‘Did you see / the Mona Lisa?’”  Kamakura’s images are always imbued with feeling, and Shea manages to translate the fine line between the visual and the emotional.  He conveys the meaning of the original, then steps aside and lets the magic speak for itself.” —David Trinidad, author of Peyton Place: A Haiku Soap Opera 

“To read these haiku sequences by Sayumi Kamakura in a season of total war and in a climate of total collapse is to be brought into double intimacy with miracle and extinction, delight and dismay. Here, the natural and the human are pointedly adjacent, and haiku's distinctive kireji or cut and kigo or seasonality form a paradoxical dyad—a climate of repose stitched with loss, a climate of catastrophe stitched with recognition and care. Poet James Shea is an extraordinarily fortuitous translator for this work, deploying surreal capacities for tone, reversal, and surprise with supple exactitude, situating Kamakura in conversation with Dickinson, Inger Christensen, and Alfred Starr Hamilton as well as with the conventions of haiku itself. Applause for a Cloud constellates Sakumi Kamakura among the great poets of cosmic supposition.”—Joyelle McSweeney, author of Death Styles

“Kamakura’s haiku, with their exacting observations, offer the right kind of tumult, the right kind of true. At the always tenuous intersection of human nature and the natural world, between self and “Self”, an unsettling beauty illuminates our always needful hearts. An ever-present echo of applause makes these poems shimmer.”—giovanni singleton, author of Ascension

“Sayumi Kamakura’s haiku presents a world so radically old that neither classical waka nor modern poetry has ever captured it before. It is the pre-human world depicted at the beginning of The Kojiki, the Japanese equivalent of Genesis, where a pair of gods were busy making love and producing the land called Onogoro Island: “Let’s churn spring / with a long ladle— / kōro-kōro.” It is the spring of this universe, celebrating the joy of all beings, without distinction between the living and the dead, even such a mundane thing as a stapler: “Inside a drawer / a stapler / singing away.”  As a free-verse poet, I am humbled to take Kamakura’s haiku as both a challenge and an encouragement to expand the horizons of contemporary poetry, which now appears too human-centered, and grateful to James Shea for guiding me to these gems hidden in my own country.”—Yasuhiro Yotsumoto, author of Family Room