Seven haikus, seven small rooms, and in almost every one a door is closing. Nettle's sequence begins with a general remark about growing up and ends with a speaker staring into a mirror and seeing only fog. Along the way, childhood, hunger, fear and loneliness keep circling one feeling: being unprotected and unseen.
Each haiku is introduced by three words, such as "Time, drains, innocent" or "Curl, Safe, Claw", and each verse then works them in, sometimes bent out of shape: "claw" becomes "claws", "forgot" becomes "forgotten", and "dots" turns into "bits". Judging by the text, the headings look like prompts the poem was built around. That gives the sequence a quiet irony. The writer must squeeze feeling through a fixed gate, and the poems are about being squeezed, enclosed and shut in. The 5-7-5 pattern holds almost perfectly. The one slip is the last haiku's opening line, "Helpless I looked", which is a syllable short. It reads like a small stumble before the speaker faces the mirror, and it suits the word "helpless".
There is no rhyme. Instead the sentences spill over the line breaks and stop mid-thought: "A child is born, but / Time drains it of innocence." The best example comes in the fifth haiku: "The tension hurt my / muscles who remembered the / Pain: Being hunted." The second line ends on a dangling "the", and the reader waits for a beat before "Pain" arrives, capitalised and followed by the only colon in the sequence. The line break creates the tension the poem names. The idea that muscles can remember is striking too. The body holds a fear the mind may want to forget.
The imagery moves between sweetness and threat. The first haiku calls the child "it", a thing that time acts upon, and "no more" could mean the child or the innocence. Then comes the cake, where dark chocolate bits spell out "sadness". A cake suggests celebration, and it may hint at birthdays and years passing, which would link it to the first haiku, though that is an inference. Either way, the sugary surface carries grief. After that the world turns predatory. The speaker curls into a "safe cocoon of leaves" away from "sharp claws", and the title makes it hard not to think of a nettle, a plant made of leaves that stings anything that comes near. The sky joins in: "The hungry heaven / swallows the clouds of my thoughts / still hungry for more." Thoughts are turned into weather and eaten by an enormous mouth, while the speaker is the hunted one. Appetite is everywhere, and the speaker is the one being consumed.
The most interesting movement is the way safety goes bad. The cocoon, which promises shelter and even change, becomes "an isolated circle / closed off from the world." The speaker, who first chose to hide, is now "forgotten" and passive: "I lay." Protection and imprisonment turn out to be the same shape. This is the poem's central idea, that the place you retreat to for safety can become the place that cuts you off.
The pronouns follow the same path. The sequence opens with a distant, third-person "it", slides into "my" and "me", and finally lands on "I" in front of a mirror. We expect a face. What we get is "heavy clouded fog", and the clouds that heaven swallowed earlier have returned. The thoughts could not be eaten away after all, and they have settled over the speaker's own reflection.
What makes the sequence worth reading is its honesty and its restraint. Haiku are often associated with quiet observation of nature, but here the feelings are named outright, in "sadness" and "helpless", and then anchored in concrete things like cake, leaves, claws and fog. The final haiku offers no comfort and no turn toward hope. It leaves the speaker looking and unable to see. Many readers will recognise that blurred, hidden, half-sheltered feeling, and seven tiny poems are enough to make it felt.