Days of Wayward Gifts

Dan Beachy-Quick soaks in Joe Deany-Braun’s “Young Santa,” Sayumi Kamakura’s “Applause for a Cloud,” and James Shea’s “Last Day of My Face.”

By Dan Beachy-QuickOctober 1, 2025

• Poetry

NO OTHER FORM I know does what a good haiku does, not to mention a great one, though it took me decades to fall in love with the form. One poem by the haiku master Kobayashi Issa converted me—it felt like one of those stories of enlightenment in The Blue Cliff Record (1125), clarity coming only after giving up on the hope for clarity. I walk around reciting it to myself to this day: “This dew drop world / is a dew drop world / Even so, even so …” Issa wrote it after the death of his young daughter. I’ve been haunted by it ever since reading it, suddenly understanding how the truth of our convictions falls so far short of the heartache of our experience—to know the world is a drop of dew does nothing to lessen the sorrow of evaporation. But my experience with contemporary haiku has been woefully meager, a lack that James Shea’s new English translation of Sayumi Kamakura’s Applause for a Cloud has thankfully begun to remedy.

Kamakura, in her seventies now, has devoted her entire artistic life to this particular poetic form. It’s an example of a singular devotion to an art that somewhat baffles the modern mind, which too easily confuses originality with variety. As a form, haiku is more redolent of the craftsperson, a potter throwing over and again the same pot of the same dimensions. The maker who came most to mind as I read the collection was On Kawara, who painted, day after day, a simple canvas marked with the month, day, and date on which the painting was begun and completed, a project that commenced in 1966, only ending with his death. Like On Kawara’s Today series, Kamakura’s haiku are also filled with time—or, perhaps it’s more proper to say her haiku catch the quicksilver eternities that time, paradoxically enough, comprises. One could open to any page and find a quintessence of lived, daily wonder, and Shea has presented them to us in triads, three poems of three lines each. Much to his credit, quiet resonances between the individual poems often unfold into vaster resonance:

The white magnolia—
two people blooming,
one person shaking

Sending petals
into the sea
and the sun setting

Lamenting the end of spring
as I give my mouth
some lipstick

The human here is more flora than fauna. The white of the magnolia bloom scents the air with the matrimonial, the innocently erotic, both people blooming into the summer of life, one trembling as they do so. It’s a poem nearly Sapphic in its understanding of how desire courses through us. The next poem leaps from blossoming intimacy to a cosmic understanding of time passing—the petals of a given season blown into the infinite, oceanic potency, and the ocean itself but a drop in the daily drama of our solar reality. Everything falls into a larger force. That phrase itself could be the quiet realization any given person comes to, not by profound thought, but by daily living—say a woman making a scarlet flower of her mouth just as the flowers outside have stopped their vernal blooming.

I’ve come to suspect the mind of a poet-translator and the poets they translate are entangled in ways nearly quantum in nature—they vibrate across distance and time at the same frequency, or nearly so, both minds humming with the grace note of some other supernal song. James Shea’s own third volume of poems, winner of the 2024 Iowa Poetry Prize, might be read with utmost pleasure in tandem with his Kamakura translation—though each stands beautifully alone, the dance between the two is exquisite.

Last Day of My Face closes with the only long poem of the entire collection, “Failed Self-Portrait.” Buried in section nine is the one literary allusion I caught that overtly announces itself: “Often / I am not permitted to return to a meadow.” The reference to Robert Duncan calls to mind one of the 20th century’s most lovely and loving paeans to the possibility of an eternal mythos continuing to hold the world together despite our feeling that everything’s falling apart. Each life for Duncan is woven into a larger life, one myriad vast unity of which anyone who says “I” is a part, in the way a single mosaic tile is part of the larger picture—though the larger picture, to the single tile, is unknown. What is it to practice poetry without the conviction that it’s adding to some transcendent whole, a conversation that outlasts the life that takes part in it? I don’t mean to suggest that Shea has forsaken such a thought, but much of the beauty and courage I find in his collection of poems is the example, over and again, of a poetry that arrives at honest worth outside of poetry’s age-old promises of wisdom and eternity. The opening poem, “Sun Broker,” acts almost as a primer to the whole collection:

Lifeguards can’t save themselves
from their own wasting.

What’s my record
of attending to the world?

A mute pool in winter.

Is wisdom efficient?

The sun’s beams reach
the patio in a tie.

What I need is a continuous ray of light at my side.

A chance to make up
for the luxury of not understanding.

We’re in the world in such a way that we cannot rescue ourselves from the condition we’re in; what’s worse, we don’t even understand our condition. Like a lifeguard watching a winter pool, we’ve misjudged the danger and are ill-trained. We measure the matter and think it matters—sunbeams neck and neck and coming to the finish line, it’s a photon finish! Humor helps a hard-won, worldly wisdom abide without ever italicizing itself into wisdom. The result is a collection of poems both thrilling and humane, attuned to the miseries of capital, skeptical of the technology that devours our daily human bandwidth, and yet wholly owning up to the complicity we helplessly find ourselves in—earning our salaries, doomscrolling Google News, Dow Jones for a prophet, and TikTok for a clown. That we play fool to the Fool is more than half the point. All of which makes Last Day of My Face a surprising and wondrous elegy—or eulogy—as if only now, in the humblest of ways, we’re learning to praise what we’ve lost, which is ourselves:

Shirt came to mourn my chest.

Shoes, the arches of my feet.

Cufflinks, my wrists. Hat, my head.

Socks, my toes, and buttons, my fingers.

Tie came to mourn the nape of my neck.

Belt, my waist. Jacket, my shoulders.

Glasses, my temples and bridge of my nose.

Underwear came and cried at the casket.

Underwear, who knew me best.

Underwear is many children’s worst Christmas gift, often in a stocking, and even when—as in my childhood—the underwear is styled so as to be a superhero’s outfit, you know in advance: putting it on gives you no special power at all. Quite the opposite, sleepovers abashedly reveal. Give me the coal. It’s enough to make a nine-year-old doubt Santa.

It’s strange to realize, nearly 52 years into life, that I never connected the word “Santa” to the word “saint,” though I knew of Saint Nick as forebear. A child hears things in strange ways and keeps whispering to the adult of how things seem to be, keeping alive rumors of a mythical gift-giver, ignoring the martyrdom. Good poets get to work in just such riddled spaces, and Joe Deany-Braun’s new collection, Young Santa, brings together saint and Santa in a way I could never have guessed at before reading this thin, quietly astonishing book. In a stanzaic form invented by the poet Jack Collom—a variant of Robert Kelly’s “lune” form—comprised of three/five/three-word tercets (and so bearing the distinct fragrance of Kamakura’s haiku), Deany-Braun upends our inherited sense of Santa as jolly giver of half-deserved joys. Far from the red-nosed, portly elder tipsy on his own generosity, Young Santa cuts the lean figure of an ascetic mystic, more Jain than djinn, closer to a stoic philosopher than to the stuff of our childhood dreams. Take this poem from late in the book, one that has thistled itself into my daily thinking, “Santa Tries to Be a Gracious Host”:

Big thoughts visit
me like foreign dignitaries at
an all-night

diner. They spend
restless nights on the fleabitten
beds of my

cheap-hostel brain
and leave in the morning
after eating their

granola. I fry
eggs and clean their rooms—
I give them

everything I have.
If only they knew how
much it costs

to keep the
lights on. But they come
from lands where

light shines without
end. When they leave, we
take photos, shake

hands. I put
the photos in frames on
the walls where

other guests cannot
fail to notice them. “How
cool,” they say,

“this place is
cool.” “Yes,” I say, “this
place is cool.”

In a subtle way, both homespun and humorous, Deany-Braun has done nothing less than offer us the epistemology undergirding the book’s larger vision. Even for a saint, perhaps especially for a saint, thoughts aren’t what you come up with yourself, but like angels or celebrities, they come unbidden to stay for a while. With a quaint nod to Keats’s brain as living bower for the gods, Deany-Braun’s brain is a traveler’s hostel, temporary abode for the minor eternities any given thought might truly be. Keats is here elsewhere, far more directly, too—as are Dylan Thomas, Ovid, Johannes Kepler, Charles Olson, Pythagoras, and lightly handled exegesis of New and Old Testament—as in “Santa Tries to Understand Negative Capability”:

Everything belongs in
the book that will never
be written: the

low blue winter
clouds in the dying day
belong, as do

the black limbs
that clutch at space and
make love. And

what of us—
do we belong in the
book of blue

clouds dying days
winter limbs and loving space?
I want to

say yes. But
someone has to not write
the never book.

It’s a curious paradox Deany-Braun’s Young Santa arrives at—the apophatic, the not-doing that must be done for any doing to be possible, the making of nothingness, a chaos bound as a book is bound, that alone makes us belong among the book of blue clouds and dying days. It casts Young Santa’s later career as steadfast philanthropist of toys and sugar in a strange, austere, phenomenological light. He’s not giving gifts away to add to our abundance but gives away all that can be given to increase in the world the nothingness it needs to continue on as world, a blank page beneath the names of the naughty and nice, the emptiness of the gift bag on December 26, a lack larger than any child can imagine, but one that makes the great gift of being possible. Shea, Kamakura, and Deany-Braun each take measure of the peculiar gift of our days, from the immediate bliss of a moment suddenly revealed (an ocean, a petal, a kiss) to the troubled complexity of modern technology and the innocent rue of middle age, from humor’s wisdom to never be wise to a child’s hidden stoicism. There is a quiet, but real, comfort as a reader in finding three gentle guides into our perplexity, reminding that confusion is not always to solve, but sometimes to confess.