Applause for a Cloud
Applause for a Cloud
by Sayumi Kamakura, translated by James Shea
Paperback / 264p. / Poetry
ISBN 978-1939568-99-1
Sayumi Kamakura’s Applause for a Cloud uses the haiku form to attend to everyday life with a cosmological acuteness, invoking wonder on macro and micro scales.
In this groundbreaking bi-lingual collection, Japanese poet Sayumi Kamakura transforms the haiku into a contemporary vehicle for exploring life’s most intimate moments and vast mysteries. Moving between her home in Japan and travels in Morocco and Italy, between her husband's illness and the global pandemic, Kamakura crafts precise observations that ripple outward into profound revelation. While honoring haiku's attention to nature and seasonal change, she breaks free of its constraints to forge a new path—where the ordinary becomes extraordinary, and where stillness speaks volumes.
Sayumi Kamakura is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Moisture, Cross in the Water, From the Skylight, La La La Goes the Sea, and The Collected Haiku of Sayumi Kamakura. Her work has appeared in dozens of anthologies in Japan and overseas, and she is the only haiku poet featured in Japanese Women Poets: An Anthology edited by Hiroaki Sato. She is the recipient of the Oki Sango Prize, Modern Haiku Association Prize, and the Azsacra International Poetry Award.
James Shea is the author of two poetry collections, The Lost Novel and Star in the Eye, both from Fence Books. He has received grants from the Fulbright US Scholar Program, Hong Kong Arts Development Council, National Endowment for the Arts, and Vermont Arts Council. He is coeditor of The Routledge Global Haiku Reader and cotranslator of Moving a Stone: Selected Poems of Yam Gong.
“To read these haiku sequences is to be brought into double intimacy with miracle and extinction, delight and dismay. Poet James Shea is an extraordinarily fortuitous translator for this work, deploying surreal capacities for tone, reversal, and surprise with supple exactitude, situating Kamakura in conversation with Dickinson, Inger Christensen, and Alfred Starr Hamilton as well as with the conventions of haiku itself. Applause for a Cloud constellates Sakumi Kamakura among the great poets of cosmic supposition.”
“Kamakura’s haiku, with their exacting observations, offer the right kind of tumult, the right kind of true.”
“In his new translations of Sayumi Kamakura’s haiku, James Shea continues to capture the uniqueness of Kamakura’s sensibility. As changes in nature intersect with her personal life, Kamakura melds the traditional with the contemporary, often in surprising or moving ways. When she anxiously waits for her husband’s operation to be completed, the wind also holds its breath. When spring ends, she applies, in an attempt to counteract the sudden absence of color, lipstick to her mouth. . . . Kamakura’s images are always imbued with feeling, and Shea manages to translate the fine line between the visual and the emotional. He conveys the meaning of the original, then steps aside and lets the magic speak for itself.”
“Kamakura’s haiku presents a world so radically old that neither classical waka nor modern poetry has ever captured it before. . . . I am humbled to take Kamakura’s haiku as both a challenge and an encouragement to expand the horizons of contemporary poetry, which now appears too human-centered, and grateful to James Shea for guiding me to these gems hidden in my own country.”
