A Crown of Roses

Sayumi Kamakura: the timelessness of the veil behind the veil behind the veil. There is much positive to say about the haiku of Sayumi Kamakura. In her recent haiku collection A Crown of Roses, and in her haiku collection from 2000 entitled A Singing Blue: 50 Selected Haiku, Sayumi Kamakura presents several impressive haiku all speaking with the quiet authority of an artist who knows her impulses and skills so well that she can make herself heard without raising her poetic voice, without over-dramatizing and without overwriting. Kamakura understands quite well the seductive qualities of haiku that are simple ... and simply well written, and which exhibit the grace and delicateness of artistic and contemporary international poetry, dancing in and out of past, present and future; reaching out from Japanese tradition into the world ... and again, from the external world, back into the womb of true Japanese intention in regards to haiku. In the work of Sayumi Kamakura, the haiku moment becomes rather the momentousness of the haiku . She has the gift of transforming the all-too-common misunderstanding of reductionism to something that is in fact larger than life; like the mystery of the bonsai. Art is never about limitation, but rather about playing within structure(s) and pressing, kneading, pushing against boundaries to give the appearance of being larger than a mathematician s (or literary/art historian s, or critic s) measurements. Sayumi Kamakura effectively exerts a feeling of timelessness in her haiku, and in the mind and experience of the reader. She accomplishes this by her adeptness in revealing the veil behind the veil behind the veil. The vibrations of the piano cords of her haiku give one a sense of the sublime, ranging from the romanticism of Sergei Vasilievich Rachmaninoff or Johannes Brahms to Karol Szymanowski to that of more minimalist composers such as Erik Satie or even Philip Glass all elements of passion for life, pressing forward and peeking out of a tranquil detachment and understated true emotion. Avid readers of my literary criticism know that I make a point out of assessing the musicality of poetry and that I stress that the inner rhythms and rhymes are equally, if not more, important as (than) the mechanical ones. Sayumi Kamakura understands and plays upon the natural music of her haiku. In short, the haiku lover cannot help but be moved by the artistry of Sayumi Kamakura, who complements her intrinsic understanding of the art of haiku writing and philosophy with a certain feminine touch that tickles the ivory keys of the piano with the very authority and grace I have referred to above.