Applause for a Cloud - by Sayumi Kamakura (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"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

About the Author

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.