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

Sayumi Kamakura’s poems marry accessible language with complex images, inviting readers to participate in their meaning. She often juxtaposes a surreal dailiness with a cosmological acuteness, invoking wonder on both miniature and maximum 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 the use of 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 uses environmental phenomena not merely to depict the world, but to create moments of stillness that usher the reader into her inner world.