Andrew Hamlin's twenty haiku read less like a planned sequence than like a pocketful of things noticed on the way through a day: a stranger's beard, a feather, a drug deal, a stretch of rail track. Traditional haiku lean on nature and the seasons. These ones look at buses, condos, DVDs and fans, and they find that a modern city has its own small weather.
The form is loose but not careless. The opening poems keep close to five, seven and five syllables: "My old enemy, / Grown his thick bushy red beard / In the five years since." The grammar is clipped, with a missing "has", as if the speaker were jotting it down. Later poems spill over the pattern. "Telephone pole tar, melting / down at the base, sticky bright / like the back of my neck" runs longer, and the capital letters at the start of lines come and go. There is no rhyme. The music comes from sound inside the lines: the soft b's of "Bowing to the breeze," the chill packed into "Cave-cold," the way "Icy breeze floats, through" breaks off on a word that lets the air slip past the line ending.
Beneath the sharp little images, many of the poems are about what has gone missing. The enemy's beard measures five years of lost time. The "yoga barn" has been replaced by tall condos, and the speaker "did" watch the traffic, a verb that has already slipped into the past. The glimpse of "Her naked bottom / Visible in a white flash" ends in "Gone to thunder now," which treats desire as lightning, brief and followed only by noise. Even the "Spicy paperback" lies on dusty floorboards with its "Good parts long torn out." The most direct poem is "How strange, to have come / this far only to end as / three lines on smooth stone." It imagines a gravestone and, in the same breath, the haiku itself as an epitaph. It is also the one place where the speaker simply stops to wonder.
Hamlin keeps this from turning solemn by dragging the body into it. We get a "left armpit" chilled by a fan, a full bladder, clenched teeth, and a soul that is "somewhere…", trailing off into an ellipsis. The "brown whiskers" in the tenth poem quietly answer the red beard of the first, so the speaker too is aging and growing hair. "My mouth, tensed or slack, / Shaping the breezes through me" turns even breath into something the world passes through. "My ears suffused with Lester" is never explained. Judging by the context, it is music, and the unexplained name makes the reader feel the speaker's private world.
Small motifs hold the sequence together. White keeps appearing: tinsel, a flash, a feather. Light things get blown about by air, and the breeze moves from tinsel to fan to feather. Some poems are deliberately odd, such as the "Limbless beauty" who wins a pageant with an orange rose in her hair, and the "Silhouette, stalking / downwind from dozing sentry / hands clutching cabbage." The poem never says what these mean. They add a dreamlike comedy, and the second one plants an idea of theft that returns at the end.
Movement matters too. At the railway the speaker is "As immobile on its side / As I am on mine," stuck on a platform across from the tracks. Near the close, the speaker swallows "Outrage at the world" and thinks, "Don't waste a good walk." That is the nearest the sequence comes to a decision, and it is practical rather than grand. The last poem borrows the line "Some days are diamonds, / some days are stones," which sounds like a song lyric, and admits: "I stole this from the busman." The confession fits the whole collection, which gathers things overheard, glimpsed and half-understood from the people and places around the speaker.
What makes the sequence worth reading is its refusal to pretend that insight arrives from a mountaintop. It shows a mind that is irritable, bored, funny and watchful, and it suggests that a life is made of such scraps, some of them lost and some of them borrowed. The proper response is to keep your eyes open and keep walking.