Book of the Week – Gratitude in the Time of COVID-19: The Haiku Hecameron

Gratitude in the Time of COVID-19, edited by Scott Mason, is not a single voice but a chorus of one hundred poets, one hundred days, each turning toward the smallest available light during a global crisis. Structured as a “hecameron,” the book echoes Boccaccio’s Decameron, yet instead of escape, it insists on presence.

In Day One, Tanya McDonald captures the strange coexistence of lockdown and renewal:

lockdown—
the fuchsia’s first bud
opens for business 

The world narrows, yet something continues to open. The poem quietly suggests that life does not wait for normalcy.

A different kind of noticing emerges in Matthew Caretti’s:

work from home
the odd accounting
of clouds 

Here, productivity dissolves into observation. Time becomes elastic, measured not in tasks but in drifting shapes. The poem reframes what it means to “work” at all.

The emotional core of the collection often lies in juxtaposition. From Wally Swist’s haibun:

pandemic deaths rise . . .
new leaves on wands of the brambles
in the scrub ditch

Grief and growth occupy the same breath. The poem does not resolve the tension but simply holds it, asking the reader to do the same.

Moments of quiet human connection thread through the book, even in enforced distance:

social distancing
we share the owl’s call
through our cellphones 

Connection here is indirect, mediated, yet still deeply felt. The natural world becomes a bridge when human proximity is denied.

And then, there are moments of distilled gratitude that feel almost defiant in their simplicity:

turning off the news
the world opens up
to birdsong 

The act is small, almost trivial, but transformative. Attention shifts, and with it, reality itself.

What makes this collection compelling is not just its subject of the pandemic, but its method. As described in the introduction, haiku arises when a sensory moment triggers an emotional response, creating a compact “packet” of experience (pp. 18–19). These poems do not explain; they offer fragments that the reader must complete.

Midway through reading, something subtle happens, and we begin to slow down. We start to notice, alongside the poets, the angle of light, the persistence of birds, the quiet resilience of ordinary days. Gratitude here is not declarative; it is practised like a discipline.

As you move through the collection, pause and ask yourself which moments feel most like your own memory of that time? Was it the fear, the stillness, the unexpected beauty or the strange intimacy of distance?

And perhaps more importantly, what do you notice now that you might have missed then?

You can read the full collection in the THF Digital Library. As you do, let the poems shift your attention, not away from difficulty, but toward what persists within it.

Do you have a full-length or chapbook-length book published in 2021 or earlier that you would like featured as a Book of the Week? Contact us for details. Haiku featured in the Book of the Week Archive are selected by the THF Digital Librarian, Vidya Premkumar and are used with permission.