Sixteen three-line glimpses of a city day, and almost nothing in them is dramatic. An ambulance man runs the wrong way from a bus. A gasoline can is knocked over and set upright again. A man knitting a green hat smells as though he hasn't washed. Andrew Hamlin's "Haiku 15" (the number suggests one entry in a longer series, though the text gives no more than that) reads like a notebook kept on the move, and its central idea is that paying attention is a way of surviving ordinary life. The speaker can't control the weather, the noise or the bad week, but he can notice, and noticing turns out to be a kind of gratitude.
That gratitude is hard-won. Weather presses on the whole sequence: "feeble sunshine," "sunny-hot pavement," "I can't stand the rain." The most telling joke comes when that complaint is revised to "the gaps in the rain." The speaker doesn't deny the rain. He lives in the intervals, and the poem's optimism is just as modest. When a leak from an overpass becomes "white gold from the sun," a plumbing fault gets briefly transfigured. When he lies on his back "grateful for no rain" before "a hard grind ahead," the gratitude is real because the grind is too.
The form is a loose version of the haiku. Many stanzas follow the five-seven-five pattern ("Gasoline can, spilled / then righted, five yards away / sunny-hot pavement"), but others bend it, and the poems drop the traditional nature-postcard for buses, teriyaki signs and a pavement saw. There is no rhyme. The music comes from speech rhythms and from line breaks that make you hesitate. "Does anybody / think, of this old bench, and its / conversation husks?" stops on "its," so that the odd phrase "conversation husks" lands as a surprise. The image is a good one: the bench holds the dried shells of talk, the way a seed head holds empty husks after the seeds have gone. Elsewhere the punctuation stays casual, with stray commas, dashes, an ellipsis and quotation marks, as if the poems were jotted down quickly.
The imagery is strongest where the observation is most exact. The fireplug is "piebald," "flaking yellow over over green," and the doubled "over" acts out the layers of repainting. It is "shorter than the weeds," so even the municipal equipment has been half swallowed by the neighbourhood. Five pigeons sit on a roof while "one does a dance while the rest / perch, vigilant," which turns a bird into a performer with an audience of critics. A spider on the seventh floor prompts the question "what makes its dinner?", a small, odd bit of curiosity that wonders about the spider's life more than it describes the web.
The poems keep dropping questions that nobody answers. "Where are you going?" gets only "a fishy face," and the bench question is left hanging. Against this the sequence puts its most tender moment: "The washerwoman's / cry in her sleep: 'She flies!' / …her sole indulgence." The ellipsis works like a held breath. All we learn about this woman is her job and her dream, and the poem says the dream is the only luxury she has. Flight arrives inside a sleeping cry, and the poem doesn't comment on it.
Humour keeps these moments from becoming sentimental. "One horrible week / the library's north window / it's Sunday again" squeezes a whole stretch of misery into a glance out of a window and a sigh of relief. Then comes the blunt confession, "I punched myself / in the head, last week, both sides / still tender, still sore." There's no explanation and no excuse, only the sore fact. It is a surprisingly honest admission of private frustration set among all the public sights.
The ending turns to the body. The last stanzas are about a boy waiting his turn beside a smaller boy, and then about smell: "In the heat I smell / the man knitting a green hat / has not washed today." After all the looking, the final sense is the least polite one. That choice is typical of the whole sequence, which refuses to prettify the city or the speaker. The poem is worth reading for that reason: it shows that a haiku can hold a pavement saw, a sore head and a sleeping washerwoman's dream of flying, and that there is something to be grateful for in each of them.