Poetry review – A HANDFUL OF WASPS: Lucy Winrow views a year through Stuart Henson’s haiku sequence drawn from observations recorded in real time
A Handful of Wasps
Stuart Henson
Shoestring Press
ISBN: 978-1-915553-61-4
36pp £8
Stuart Henson’s eleventh poetry collection opens with a telling quote from French impressionist painter Berthe Morisot:
My ambition was no more than to
capture something of what goes by –
just something, the smallest thing.
The statement’s apparent simplicity is a subtle nod to how A Handful of Wasps unfolds: an open-ended sequence of 72 carefully observed haikus, moving steadily through the seasons. Each poem is dated, anchoring perception to a specific point in time, and corresponds loosely to the traditional Japanese calendar, which marks subtle seasonal shifts. These divisions provide rhythm and structure, yet the poems themselves are less concerned with progression than with attentive noticing: a bird on a wire, a fallen leaf, a waterlogged field. On December 19th, Henson observes:
On the shining field
no trace of the week-old snow
Taps creak Water flows
This haiku captures a moment of transition, as the week-old snow has vanished but its effects linger in the shining, saturated ground. The taps “creak” before the water flows, evoking the hesitant, uneven movement of thawing water and emphasising the landscape’s gradual, imperceptible change.
This is Henson’s third collaboration with artist Bill Sanderson, whose illustrations accompany a number of poems in A Handful of Wasps. Printed in black on white, the images are pared back, rendered in Sanderson’s distinctive scratchboard technique, with its bold, woodcut-like effect. Their high contrast and lack of ornament do not embellish the poems but extend their attentiveness, presenting the countryside without nostalgia and sharing the poems’ matter-of-fact clarity.
This restraint is especially effective in the pairing of poem and image for the September 11th haiku:
The abandoned barn
roofless, stares at the night sky –
at stars like rat’s eyes.
Sanderson’s accompanying illustration shows a roofless barn beneath an impossibly dense sky, thick with stars. The hard contrast of the scratchboard image disrupts what might conventionally register as stillness or beauty, making the scene feel crowded and charged.
The poem’s anthropomorphism is subtle but unsettling. The barn does not simply sit beneath the sky; it stares into it, lending the structure an alert, observing presence, at odds with its apparently abandoned state. The simile in the final line completes the turn, stripping the night sky of romance, replacing wonder with something beady and faintly threatening.
This refusal to sentimentalise runs throughout the collection. Although the poems are at times playful, funny, or sensuously vivid, they never present nature as consoling or morally legible. Instead, Henson insists on its neutrality: abundant, violent, beautiful, indifferent. The calendar gives an illusion of order, but within it events unfold without narrative reassurance.
The poems repeatedly present nature as active but unthinking – a force that proceeds according to its own rhythms, without regard for human feeling or moral frameworks. Animals hunt, weather arrives and machines advance, and Henson refuses to frame such events as tragic, purposeful, or redemptive. This unsentimental clarity is especially evident in poems involving predation and loss. In the August 8th entry:
A stoat on the lawn
break-dancing at fast-forward
Pigeon for breakfast
Humour and violence collide as the stoat’s frantic movement is rendered comical, almost cartoonish, yet the final line lands with blunt finality. A life has ended; it barely registers. The jaunty rhythm sharpens rather than softens the brutality of the scene. There is no elegy here, only the fact of consumption.
A quieter but more devastating example appears on July 16th:
Hen partridge Three chicks
A week later only two
nimble as shadows
The poem hinges on absence. One chick has disappeared, and the poem refuses to explain or soften that fact. The final line, ostensibly hopeful, only heightens the sense of precarity. To be “nimble as shadows” suggests lightness and speed, but also insubstantiality and threat. Survival is temporary and provisional.
Even abundance is stripped of comfort in the July 8th entry:
Under our cherry
a cub fox snuffs for an hour
gorging on ripeness
The possessive “our” signals human attachment, yet the fox’s feast is instinctual, not grateful. Its absorption in ripeness is neither greedy nor celebratory, just timely. “Snuffs” is delicately onomatopoeic, capturing the cub’s focused, tentative search while emphasising the moment’s sensory richness. The hour duration suggests both the fox’s ease and the speaker’s patient observation. The final line lifts the act beyond feeding, showing participation in the season’s fulfilment.
The lack of sentiment also extends to Henson’s treatment of human intervention in the landscape. On August 10th:
Stripes on Meadow Hill:
a combine snuffling the dusk
with hot, angry eyes
The first line evokes a gentle, pastoral image that lulls the reader into a calm state, before subverting expectations: the machine is anthropomorphised as a living creature, its “snuffling” suggesting tentative curiosity, even gentleness. The turn comes in the final line, where “hot, angry eyes” shocks the reader, transforming the harmless snuffle into something aggressive and predatory. The combine becomes a hybrid of human design and animal-like intent; its headlights function as eyes capable of destruction, highlighting both the power and threat inherent in human tools acting on the natural world.
In contrast to Henson’s unsentimental depictions, some haikus invite the reader to engage through humour, defamiliarisation and playfulness, overturning expectation and refreshing perception. On January 24th:
The pond’s an ice-rink
its jetty going nowhere
Moorhens skate figures
A familiar scene is reimagined with gentle absurdity. The pond becomes an ice-rink, the “going nowhere” jetty evokes human contrivance, and the moorhens’ movements are envisioned as deliberate, performative skaters. Humour emerges through anthropomorphism and defamiliarisation, transforming ordinary winter activity into something theatrical and whimsical.
Later in the year on July 25th Henson notices
Sunlight and mauve scent:
Buddleia, alive with soft
fragments of stained glass
This haiku reshapes a familiar garden scene through sensory and metaphorical surprise. The opening line blends colour and smell in a slightly surreal way, prompting the reader to perceive the familiar anew. The second line grounds the impression in the plant, imbuing it with gentle vibrancy, while the final line “fragments of stained glass,” evokes butterflies drawn to the flowers, capturing both delicacy and intricate patterning. “Fragments” suggests individuality within a broader natural tapestry, moving the poem from immediate sensory experience to a layered appreciation of colour, movement, and life.
Anthropomorphism is one of the collection’s most persistent strategies. Birds make promises, leaves have hands, and months decay like bodies. These gestures create immediacy and emotional pull, drawing the reader closer. They also function as a form of self-scrutiny, revealing how instinctively human perception frames the non-human world in its own image. On April 21st:
Swallows on the wire
keeping a year-long promise
we hardly deserve
In this poem, the birds are cast as moral agents – faithful, dependable, almost benevolent. The implication that they return for us centres human experience, but the final line immediately undercuts this assumption. The promise is not mutual; it is unearned. What we experience as reassurance is simply migration, misread as intention.
A similar tension operates on April 27th:
Shy leaf-hands outstretched
Rain crosses palms with silver
Cloud like a grey purse
The haiku creates a tender, intimate scene through sustained anthropomorphism and a network of hand-related images. The opening line casts new leaves as tentative, their reaching suggesting both vulnerability and quiet determination. In the second line, rain becomes an active participant rather than a passive force, “crossing palms with silver,” meeting the leaves as if in a careful, deliberate exchange. The final line lifts the perspective: the cloud becomes a “grey purse,” gathering and distributing the rain as if part of the same network of gestures. The imagery unites leaf, rain, and cloud into a single, imagined system of careful interaction, collapsing the gap between human motion and natural process, giving the scene its intimate emotional resonance.
If anthropomorphic projection allows us to register the rhythms of nature, it is time itself that structures the collection. Time in these poems is neither linear nor dramatic; it is architectural and cyclical, measured through small turns rather than grand events. The dated format encourages forward movement, but the poems resist narrative progression, favouring repetition, modulation, and pause.
Seasonal change is registered through subtle shifts in colour, texture, and scent, where transitions are noticed rather than announced. Wheat turns “bread-blonde”; buds give way to scent, scent to rot; and apples fall early, as in the July 1st haiku:
Gobstopper harvest
July’s little apple-fall
and summer’s first loss
The opening phrase is initially playful and puzzling; the second line clarifies the image, likening the small, bright apples to sweets spilled from a machine. This defamiliarisation conveys colour and abundance while emphasising the apples’ smallness at this stage of the season. The final line shifts the tone from whimsy to reflection, marking the early onset of decline and reminding us that even at the height of summer, processes of falling and decay are already underway.
Henson tracks time through minute, perceptible changes, linking playfulness with awareness of mortality. This attentiveness to subtle shifts and turning points carries forward into the final poem, dated September 23rd (Equinox):
Earth on its axis
ticks like a bicycle wheel
spun to a slow stop
The comparison collapses the cosmic into the domestic, making planetary movement audible and graspable. Crucially, the poem does not suggest that the Earth actually stops; rather, it captures the felt perception of slowing as light diminishes and the year tips toward winter. The ticking evokes deceleration rather than cessation. Time does not end; it recalibrates, echoing the small, attentive turns seen in earlier haikus and drawing the sequence to its contemplative close.
Transcribed from a pocket notebook, Henson’s poems capture observations made on the move. As the book’s title suggests, these moments are fleeting – alive, elusive, and impossible to grasp fully. The small, portable format of the book itself mirrors the intimacy of the sequence, allowing the reader to hold these observations close.
Read individually, the haikus are sharp, self-contained snapshots; together, they form a sustained meditation on time, and the interplay between human perception and the natural world. By refusing to sentimentalise nature or impose moral coherence, Henson creates a different kind of intimacy – one grounded in patience and acceptance of indifference.
The dated structure offers a handrail through the year, marking seasonal shifts, while the subtle turns within the poems provide momentum. Loss and abundance, humour and threat, beauty and violence coexist without resolution. Nature does not pause for grief, nor celebrate its own generosity.
Anthropomorphism, defamiliarisation, and rich sensory imagery allow readers to engage with nature intimately, without projecting human moral frameworks onto it. Meaning lies not in what nature offers, but in how carefully we notice it. Henson’s poems ask us only to observe, to bear witness to what goes by.
Jan 24 2026
London Grip Poetry Review – Stuart Henson
Poetry review – A HANDFUL OF WASPS: Lucy Winrow views a year through Stuart Henson’s haiku sequence drawn from observations recorded in real time
Stuart Henson’s eleventh poetry collection opens with a telling quote from French impressionist painter Berthe Morisot:
The statement’s apparent simplicity is a subtle nod to how A Handful of Wasps unfolds: an open-ended sequence of 72 carefully observed haikus, moving steadily through the seasons. Each poem is dated, anchoring perception to a specific point in time, and corresponds loosely to the traditional Japanese calendar, which marks subtle seasonal shifts. These divisions provide rhythm and structure, yet the poems themselves are less concerned with progression than with attentive noticing: a bird on a wire, a fallen leaf, a waterlogged field. On December 19th, Henson observes:
This haiku captures a moment of transition, as the week-old snow has vanished but its effects linger in the shining, saturated ground. The taps “creak” before the water flows, evoking the hesitant, uneven movement of thawing water and emphasising the landscape’s gradual, imperceptible change.
This is Henson’s third collaboration with artist Bill Sanderson, whose illustrations accompany a number of poems in A Handful of Wasps. Printed in black on white, the images are pared back, rendered in Sanderson’s distinctive scratchboard technique, with its bold, woodcut-like effect. Their high contrast and lack of ornament do not embellish the poems but extend their attentiveness, presenting the countryside without nostalgia and sharing the poems’ matter-of-fact clarity.
This restraint is especially effective in the pairing of poem and image for the September 11th haiku:
Sanderson’s accompanying illustration shows a roofless barn beneath an impossibly dense sky, thick with stars. The hard contrast of the scratchboard image disrupts what might conventionally register as stillness or beauty, making the scene feel crowded and charged.
The poem’s anthropomorphism is subtle but unsettling. The barn does not simply sit beneath the sky; it stares into it, lending the structure an alert, observing presence, at odds with its apparently abandoned state. The simile in the final line completes the turn, stripping the night sky of romance, replacing wonder with something beady and faintly threatening.
This refusal to sentimentalise runs throughout the collection. Although the poems are at times playful, funny, or sensuously vivid, they never present nature as consoling or morally legible. Instead, Henson insists on its neutrality: abundant, violent, beautiful, indifferent. The calendar gives an illusion of order, but within it events unfold without narrative reassurance.
The poems repeatedly present nature as active but unthinking – a force that proceeds according to its own rhythms, without regard for human feeling or moral frameworks. Animals hunt, weather arrives and machines advance, and Henson refuses to frame such events as tragic, purposeful, or redemptive. This unsentimental clarity is especially evident in poems involving predation and loss. In the August 8th entry:
Humour and violence collide as the stoat’s frantic movement is rendered comical, almost cartoonish, yet the final line lands with blunt finality. A life has ended; it barely registers. The jaunty rhythm sharpens rather than softens the brutality of the scene. There is no elegy here, only the fact of consumption.
A quieter but more devastating example appears on July 16th:
The poem hinges on absence. One chick has disappeared, and the poem refuses to explain or soften that fact. The final line, ostensibly hopeful, only heightens the sense of precarity. To be “nimble as shadows” suggests lightness and speed, but also insubstantiality and threat. Survival is temporary and provisional.
Even abundance is stripped of comfort in the July 8th entry:
The possessive “our” signals human attachment, yet the fox’s feast is instinctual, not grateful. Its absorption in ripeness is neither greedy nor celebratory, just timely. “Snuffs” is delicately onomatopoeic, capturing the cub’s focused, tentative search while emphasising the moment’s sensory richness. The hour duration suggests both the fox’s ease and the speaker’s patient observation. The final line lifts the act beyond feeding, showing participation in the season’s fulfilment.
The lack of sentiment also extends to Henson’s treatment of human intervention in the landscape. On August 10th:
The first line evokes a gentle, pastoral image that lulls the reader into a calm state, before subverting expectations: the machine is anthropomorphised as a living creature, its “snuffling” suggesting tentative curiosity, even gentleness. The turn comes in the final line, where “hot, angry eyes” shocks the reader, transforming the harmless snuffle into something aggressive and predatory. The combine becomes a hybrid of human design and animal-like intent; its headlights function as eyes capable of destruction, highlighting both the power and threat inherent in human tools acting on the natural world.
In contrast to Henson’s unsentimental depictions, some haikus invite the reader to engage through humour, defamiliarisation and playfulness, overturning expectation and refreshing perception. On January 24th:
A familiar scene is reimagined with gentle absurdity. The pond becomes an ice-rink, the “going nowhere” jetty evokes human contrivance, and the moorhens’ movements are envisioned as deliberate, performative skaters. Humour emerges through anthropomorphism and defamiliarisation, transforming ordinary winter activity into something theatrical and whimsical.
Later in the year on July 25th Henson notices
This haiku reshapes a familiar garden scene through sensory and metaphorical surprise. The opening line blends colour and smell in a slightly surreal way, prompting the reader to perceive the familiar anew. The second line grounds the impression in the plant, imbuing it with gentle vibrancy, while the final line “fragments of stained glass,” evokes butterflies drawn to the flowers, capturing both delicacy and intricate patterning. “Fragments” suggests individuality within a broader natural tapestry, moving the poem from immediate sensory experience to a layered appreciation of colour, movement, and life.
Anthropomorphism is one of the collection’s most persistent strategies. Birds make promises, leaves have hands, and months decay like bodies. These gestures create immediacy and emotional pull, drawing the reader closer. They also function as a form of self-scrutiny, revealing how instinctively human perception frames the non-human world in its own image. On April 21st:
In this poem, the birds are cast as moral agents – faithful, dependable, almost benevolent. The implication that they return for us centres human experience, but the final line immediately undercuts this assumption. The promise is not mutual; it is unearned. What we experience as reassurance is simply migration, misread as intention.
A similar tension operates on April 27th:
The haiku creates a tender, intimate scene through sustained anthropomorphism and a network of hand-related images. The opening line casts new leaves as tentative, their reaching suggesting both vulnerability and quiet determination. In the second line, rain becomes an active participant rather than a passive force, “crossing palms with silver,” meeting the leaves as if in a careful, deliberate exchange. The final line lifts the perspective: the cloud becomes a “grey purse,” gathering and distributing the rain as if part of the same network of gestures. The imagery unites leaf, rain, and cloud into a single, imagined system of careful interaction, collapsing the gap between human motion and natural process, giving the scene its intimate emotional resonance.
If anthropomorphic projection allows us to register the rhythms of nature, it is time itself that structures the collection. Time in these poems is neither linear nor dramatic; it is architectural and cyclical, measured through small turns rather than grand events. The dated format encourages forward movement, but the poems resist narrative progression, favouring repetition, modulation, and pause.
Seasonal change is registered through subtle shifts in colour, texture, and scent, where transitions are noticed rather than announced. Wheat turns “bread-blonde”; buds give way to scent, scent to rot; and apples fall early, as in the July 1st haiku:
The opening phrase is initially playful and puzzling; the second line clarifies the image, likening the small, bright apples to sweets spilled from a machine. This defamiliarisation conveys colour and abundance while emphasising the apples’ smallness at this stage of the season. The final line shifts the tone from whimsy to reflection, marking the early onset of decline and reminding us that even at the height of summer, processes of falling and decay are already underway.
Henson tracks time through minute, perceptible changes, linking playfulness with awareness of mortality. This attentiveness to subtle shifts and turning points carries forward into the final poem, dated September 23rd (Equinox):
The comparison collapses the cosmic into the domestic, making planetary movement audible and graspable. Crucially, the poem does not suggest that the Earth actually stops; rather, it captures the felt perception of slowing as light diminishes and the year tips toward winter. The ticking evokes deceleration rather than cessation. Time does not end; it recalibrates, echoing the small, attentive turns seen in earlier haikus and drawing the sequence to its contemplative close.
Transcribed from a pocket notebook, Henson’s poems capture observations made on the move. As the book’s title suggests, these moments are fleeting – alive, elusive, and impossible to grasp fully. The small, portable format of the book itself mirrors the intimacy of the sequence, allowing the reader to hold these observations close.
Read individually, the haikus are sharp, self-contained snapshots; together, they form a sustained meditation on time, and the interplay between human perception and the natural world. By refusing to sentimentalise nature or impose moral coherence, Henson creates a different kind of intimacy – one grounded in patience and acceptance of indifference.
The dated structure offers a handrail through the year, marking seasonal shifts, while the subtle turns within the poems provide momentum. Loss and abundance, humour and threat, beauty and violence coexist without resolution. Nature does not pause for grief, nor celebrate its own generosity.
Anthropomorphism, defamiliarisation, and rich sensory imagery allow readers to engage with nature intimately, without projecting human moral frameworks onto it. Meaning lies not in what nature offers, but in how carefully we notice it. Henson’s poems ask us only to observe, to bear witness to what goes by.