Dark but very gentle poems. Hagiwara exhibits a lot of care to the tiny and overlooked. Some of these things are frail, but he also seems to find a kind of strength in them - a sense which I got with the recurring notion of being oriented towards the sky.
Hagiwara seems to be greatly generous to the forgotten world of austere things. There is a kind of communication here, in the Bataillean sense. The poem themselves seem to be, at least according to Muro Saisei and Kitahara Hakushu, consolations for the illness Hagiwara experienced. While Nick Land seems to paint communication as something seemingly violent (and somewhat sadomasochistic), Hagiwara seems to think it and feel it with a kind of love. It's almost maternal, in a way?
My favorite poems are the ones which clustered around the one about bacteria. The way 'bacteria' is written in hiragana has a kind of cuteness to it. The friendship between Hagiwara and Muro also seems to be really tender. I'm wondering what the figure of the shojo, though explicitly absent from these poems, might play here, given its centrality in the work of some male writers during this time.
My rating is not so high because it's not really to my taste. Nevertheless, it did give me a lot of things to think about.