“the darkness between us”

A photograph, a schoolyard, a bird’s feather, a childhood hiding place, a family death, a wildfire, a medical diagnosis. In A House Meant Only for Summer, Cherie Hunter Day finds the material of poetry in what remains after an experience has passed. The prose remembers, examines and sometimes circles around what cannot quite be said. The haiku and tanka prose that follow do something different. They leave the reader with an image that carries the thought forward.

Published by Red Moon Press in 2023, the collection brings together three sections, bits of eraser, at flight’s end and the parentheses of night. It draws on haibun and tanka prose published over many years in journals including Contemporary Haibun Online, Frogpond, Modern Haiku, Ribbons and Modern Haibun & Tanka Prose. 

Day began publishing haibun in 2001 and later added tanka prose. She has also published haiku, tanka, prose poems and rengay, and currently lives in the Bay Area with her family and seventeen redwoods. 

The collection opens with memory, and one of its strengths is how Day lets the prose carry the weight of a complicated past before the short poem makes its own observation. In “Inclement Weather,” a family photograph becomes a record of a sister leaving and of emotions that cannot be contained by the picture:

thunderclap
the darkness
between us     p. 13 

The haiku does not repeat what the prose has already told us. Instead, it gives the emotional distance a physical form. “Darkness” becomes the space between people who are standing close enough to touch.

In “Hideaway,” childhood memory is attached to domestic objects and the private refuge of a cupboard:

winter birds
beneath the sunken branches
of arborvitae

I huddle in a snowdrift
that smells faintly of cedar   p. 14 

The prose moves from the enclosed cupboard into the woods, and the poem follows that movement. The cedar scent makes the remembered hiding place tactile, not merely nostalgic.

The collection is also capable of turning an ordinary classroom detail into something wonderfully precise:

pop quiz
bits of eraser swept
onto the floor           p. 15 

The “pop quiz” belongs to the world of schoolwork, while the discarded eraser fragments belong to everything happening around the lesson. The poem notices what the official activity overlooks.

In “Sugar Work,” the domestic and natural worlds become intertwined:

horizon’s curve
in the taste
of nectar        p. 36 

The prose describes bees working inside an oak and ends with the phrase “a house meant only for summer.” The haiku turns that idea towards sweetness and distance. “Horizon” is something seen, while “nectar” is something tasted. The two meet in the middle.

Later, grief enters through dream:

within reach
of high tide . . .
her unmarked grave      p. 71 

The preceding prose describes a room filled with clocks belonging to the speaker’s mother, who has been dead for thirty-one years. The haiku refuses to explain the dream. Instead, the image of a grave within reach of the tide creates a sense of memory being continually approached and reshaped.

One of the pleasures of A House Meant Only for Summer is watching how Day moves between the remembered and the observed. The prose can be expansive, even conversational, while the accompanying short form often acts as a pressure point. It does not summarise the prose. It changes how we read it.

As you read, try pausing before each haiku or tanka and ask yourself what you think the prose has prepared you to encounter. Then read the short poem. Sometimes it answers the prose. Sometimes it contradicts it. Sometimes it simply opens another door.

You can read the complete collection in the THF Digital Library. You can now also find the THF Digital Library easily through the carousel on the home page, making it simpler to explore the books, journals, and other treasures in the archive.

Do you have a full- or chapbook-length book published in 2021 or earlier that you would like featured as a Book of the Week? Contact us for details. THF Digital Librarian Vidya Premkumar selects Book of the Week titles, and we feature them with permission.