Five haiku, five small scenes, and almost none of them tell you what to feel. Andrew Hamlin gives us a bus window, a library, a stranger's clothing, a lost friendship and a mattress on the floor. Together they make a sketch of ordinary modern attention: noticing, wondering, getting tired.
The form is the first thing to notice. Each piece follows the traditional pattern of three lines of five, seven and five syllables, and the count holds almost perfectly. The only wobble is "too tired" in the last haiku, which gives six or seven syllables depending on how you say it. There is no rhyme, so the music comes from sound and pacing instead. In the first haiku, "tarry" is an old, unhurried word, and it sits against the blunt, falling "plunge headlong to ground." The vocabulary acts out the difference between the raindrops it describes. Some linger on the glass and some drop away, and the question mark leaves the poem wondering why, in a way that easily stretches from raindrops to people.
Windows frame the first two haiku. In the second, the speaker is "Nearsighted, sensing / rain through library window." The speaker cannot see clearly, so the rain is felt rather than watched, and it arrives as "a shiver in air." Haiku traditionally pay close attention to the natural world and the season, and this one does so with a twist. The perception is blurred, indirect and slightly vulnerable, and the glass stands between the speaker and the weather. The first poem looks at drops on a window and the second looks through one. Both keep the world at a small distance.
The third haiku turns to the reader: "Will you stop to count / how many short messages / written on your clothes?" Here the poem asks about attention directly. I read "short messages" as slogans and logos on clothing, though the poem never says so, and it could also hint that we all carry signals about ourselves. The word "count" is revealing, because it turns noticing into a chore or a game. The raindrops on the bus window were something to watch, and now the surface being read is a person.
The fourth haiku is the funniest and the saddest. "After twenty years / I'm unfriended, for getting / David Bowie wrong." The phrase "unfriended" places the poem firmly in the age of social media, a very un-traditional subject for a haiku. The humor comes from the mismatch between the span of "twenty years" and the trivial cause. But the line break after "for getting" delays the reveal, so the cause lands as a small punch. Under the joke is a real sense of how fragile a long connection can be, and how much of our identity we pin to taste. The speaker's tone is dry and does not complain, which makes the loss easier to believe.
The sequence ends on "Purple air mattress / outside Portland; too tired / to switch off the lights." After the abstract questions and the digital break-up, we get a solid, physical, slightly comic object. The color purple, the temporary bed and the semicolon that splits the line all give the feeling of a stop along the way. The final image is of someone too worn out to complete even the smallest act. Judging by the imagery, the poem is closing on exhaustion rather than resolution, with a light left burning in a room where no one has the energy to put it out. Nothing is explained, and the unfinished feeling is the point.
What makes the set significant is how it stretches a very old, very compact form to hold contemporary life: buses, libraries, Facebook-style friendship, a borrowed bed. The traditional virtues of haiku are still here, namely restraint, sharp detail and the trust that the reader will fill the silence. Yet the tone is more casual and more self-mocking than a reader might expect, and the subject has shifted from landscape to the small embarrassments and fatigues of an ordinary person. The poems suggest that these moments, which we normally hurry past, are worth a second look. Like the drops on the bus window, they run down the glass quickly, and the poem is an attempt to watch a few of them go.