The refrain "Summer sets…" does a lot of quiet work. The obvious reading is the sun going down, but "sets" also suggests concrete hardening or a broken bone knitting, something that stops being flexible. Across fifteen tiny poems, summer isn't a postcard of beaches and sunshine. It is a season in the middle of stiffening and ending, seen through scraps of a neighbourhood: a wagon at the curb, a wading pool, a coop, a dog with a ball. The central idea is that endings arrive in small, slightly ridiculous details long before anyone announces them.
The form is looser than a textbook haiku. The lines are short, usually two to four beats, and nothing rhymes. The refrain itself is only three syllables, so there is no strict 5-7-5 count. Instead the poem keeps the spirit of the form: a quick image, a seasonal marker, and a gap between lines where the reader does the thinking. Many of the entries are closer to senryu, the cousin of haiku that looks at human foibles, which would explain the nail fungus and the suspenders. The trailing ellipsis after "Summer sets…" works like a held breath, and the repetition builds a slow tick, like a clock or a sun lowering by degrees. The title's number also hints that this is one of a numbered run of haiku, though the poem itself doesn't say so.
The best images tie the season to the body. "Sweat on my left wrist dries / faster than my right" is almost comically specific, and it sets up the later "my watch band, / cracked ancient," where the word "ancient" turns a worn strap into a comment on the speaker's own age. "Sunburned earlobes / scratch the pillow" and "I clamp suspenders / to my long pants" are about the shift toward evening and cooler weather, and about being someone who needs holding together. Sound does some of the work too. The s of "sets" returns in "sweat," "sunburned," "suspenders" and "sunken," so the season seems to hiss through the whole sequence. "Fire truck howls / like a hollow tooth" crosses senses, turning a siren into an ache, and the repeated h and l sounds hollow the line out.
The poem keeps changing its mood, and that is much of its charm. A "potentate" breathing bubbles "from a sunken throne" is mock-grand, and the picture may be of someone in a bath, though the poem never says. A few lines later, "little boy bows / to landing ducks" gives the same idea of courtliness a tender, innocent form. Then there are stranger notes. "Reticence / fouled by the waters of love… / blood incidental" is the sequence's one flash of romantic or physical drama, and it is deliberately hard to read. "Truck horn, / punctuation / for no sentence" is a fine joke about noise with no meaning, and perhaps also about a summer that no longer adds up to a story.
Under the jokes is a darker current. The line "…no longer / time enough left to watch / all the films he wants" begins with an ellipsis, as though mid-thought, and states the sequence's real worry outright: there isn't enough time. After it come the cracked watch band and then the most haunting entry, "dog's ball rolls / alone," where the game has simply stopped. The final haiku, "ball-peen hammer wedged / in the chicken coop," is left unexplained. It echoes the dog's ball with its own "ball," but this one is a tool, and the image feels faintly ominous. Perhaps something has been fixed, perhaps something has gone wrong. Either way, the poem ends on an object stuck where it shouldn't be, not a neat farewell.
That refusal to wrap things up is what makes the sequence worth reading. Hamlin doesn't announce that summer is a metaphor for ageing. He lets toddlers, ducks and a sweaty wrist stand next to a cracked watch band and an abandoned ball, and trusts us to notice the slope from play to loss. The humour keeps it from turning sentimental, and the sadness keeps the humour from being merely silly. By the last line you realise you've been watching a season, and a life, slowly harden into place.