Read quickly, "Haiku 56" looks like a heap of jotted observations, the kind a notebook collects on a bus or in a kitchen. Read slowly, it turns out to be organised by a few stubborn preoccupations. The title promises haiku, and the poem delivers them, but it also slips in pieces labelled "tanka", the five-line form that leaves more room for a story or a confession. The mixture suits the material. A haiku can catch a flicker, while a tanka can say what the flicker cost.
The dates give the sequence a diary shape: "First of July", "Third of July", "Sixth of July". Between them come little scenes, each hinging on a gap between what is expected and what is there. In the first, "rain sounds but no rain" on the back of the bus. The second has a tree that "thinks about what the wind / might do next", a lovely piece of personification because it makes stillness a kind of suspense. Even the Diet Coke is a small surprise: "ice blocks the pitcher's spout" and the drink comes out "corkscrewed". Hamlin often turns a noun into an action, as with "sneakered away", where the shoe becomes the whole escape.
The recurring idea is wear. Soap is "worn away soon", the sofa in the desert is "worn", and in the projector tanka the "story's end wears thin". The projector poem is one of the best. The "ticks / of the uptake reel / spinning alone" give us a film that has finished while the machine keeps going. Later the soap bubble "improves the world, exactly / 24 seconds". The precision is funny, and it also seems to echo film, since 24 is a familiar frame-rate number. That is only an inference, but the echo feels earned. Both images are about something lovely and temporary being used up, and the poem doesn't mourn it. It counts the seconds.
The poem is also full of things half-known. Her hair is "not quite tentacles / but inquisitive", a phrase that holds comedy, affection and a little strangeness in one go. The mask "hung / from the hydrant" is a found object with no explanation. Judging by the imagery, a modern reader may think of the pandemic years, but the poem never says so and the image works without it. The longest tanka goes furthest. The speaker says "I can never know / 'Rosie'", then lists the possibilities: "Woman, girl, dog, cat, / phantom, or a lack". All he has is a neighbour's nightly screaming, which he calls "clockwork valor". The phrase links back to the ticking reel. Both are mechanical repetitions, but here the repetition looks like courage, or at least stubbornness.
Sound, or the lack of it, runs through the whole sequence. There is rain that makes noise without rain, a reel ticking in an empty room, and a screamed name. In the tanka about the man who "taunted me / for not saying hello", the speaker nearly performs his "deaf act" before retreating. The poem lets him look slightly cowardly and slightly absurd, which makes it more trustworthy than if he had won the exchange. The moon poems are gentler: the speaker shakes "condensation / from a sherbet pint", and then the moon "stays up / for anyone to take / its hint". The ordinary kitchen moment and the huge sky are given the same level, friendly tone.
Formally there is no rhyme and no strict syllable count. The lines run short, often four or five syllables, and they depend on dashes, ellipses and abrupt turns. The ellipses in "First of July…" and "The moon again…" work like held breaths before the image arrives. Brand names ("Safeguard", "Diet Coke") and the blunt, funny line about stubble keep the poem in everyday life rather than in a postcard landscape.
That is where its interest lies. It treats haiku as a way of paying attention rather than a set of rules about seasons and nature. Its central claim is modest and convincing: a life is made of used-up soap, melting ice and voices we cannot identify, and noticing them, even for twenty-four seconds, improves the world a little.