Peter Macrow reviews ...

Walking the Tideline, by Lyn Reeves

Pardalote Press, 2001. 54pp. RRP $13.00

ISBN 0 9578436 0 7

Lovers of haiku were given a beautiful gift in December 2001 with the publishing of the first collection of Lyn Reeves’ haiku. Containing about 70 poems and released by Pardalote Press, Walking the Tideline is a beautifully presented book of poetry, gentle, luminous images, finely crafted responses to the everyday world of nature and people.

Lyn is well-known in Australia and overseas as a haiku poet. She is represented in the international anthology Haiku sans frontieres (Les Editions David, 1998). She is haiku editor for Famous Reporter and contact person for HaikuOz (online). She is also recognised as a fine poet in other genres, having recently received a prestigious Australia Council grant for New Work.

Her small landscape format book (18cm x 12.5cm) is a joy to hold and to read. In muted tones, the cover image captures the tideline in one of its lonely moods. A design, overlaid at the top and bottom of the cover, is repeated at the joining edge of each left and right hand page. It is derived from a close-up of seaweed. It looks somewhat like cell structure, suggesting perhaps a going beneath to the underlying unity of phenomena. Her book was brought to fruition with the creative collaboration of gifted designer, Julie Hunt.

In a brief introduction Lyn mentions some of the differences between haiku-in-English and Japanese haiku:

Haiku-in-English rarely consist of 17 syllables, may be written in one to four lines, and don’t have to be about the seasons. What they seek to retain is the brevity, clarity, immediacy and resonance of Japanese haiku and to record and share a moment of seeing.

The haiku in Walking the Tideline illustrate some of these differences. Only 4 out of 71 are in 17 syllables, but most might be in 9 – 12 syllables, just enough in English to be brief and clear. Most are in three lines, about a third are single-liners. The poet obviously felt free to choose the form which best conveys her content.

Haiku-in-English are often little nature poems. If Lyn’s were just this, with their sensitive cadences, accessible syntax and vivid moment of seeing, they would still enrich haiku literature, but they are much more:

blurred moon...
a snowflake melting
in the dark river

This poem was highly commended by the Mainichi Daily News. Perhaps the Japanese saw in the blurred moon one of the season words they love so much and in the dissolving snowflake the beauty and sadness of fleeting things.

The haiku in the collection are grouped according to season, starting with Spring, in the Japanese way, but a season word is not included slavishly, and I don’t think there is the fifth Japanese season, New Year. The poems on the bottom of the right hand page follow the tideline through the year. The others show different aspects of nature and human nature. There is no direct seasonal reference in the first or last poem – and it works well.

beached whelk
in its hollows
the ocean

This is a variation on ‘the whole world in a grain of sand’. That is one of Lyn’s special gifts, to choose elements which call up a whole world of detail and association.

walking the tideline stopped in my tracks
by a shell

This poem could easily have been in three lines, but the long first line suggests the shoreline and the short second line-clump the shell. In her introduction Lyn describes her haiku in Tideline as shells and hopes that in some of them we will hear the sea. They have their resonance. Here, as elsewhere, we are helped to see the often overlooked, unpretentious beauty of everyday things.

Sometimes there is an amusing glance at human nature:

after the argument
he brings me a bunch of red
radishes

The situation is familiar. We know discord is a part of life but see that it, too, passes. We are spared the jarring tones, focussing rather on the will to restore harmony in the delightful surprise of the resolution.

Among the seagulls and sparrows, magpies and swans, jellyfish, crabs, aeroplanes and beach umbrellas, roses scattered at sea, the white eucalyptus trunk fleshed pink and the jacaranda blue of the sky, the river polished silver and irises about to burst, the wardrobe with his dead wife’s dresses and the glow of embers after the guests have left, there is a bee poem I am particularly fond of:

on the blank page
the stumbling bee inscribes
a message in gold

Knowing Lyn is a partner in Bumble-bee Books, one might suspect that she is modestly identifying with the stumbling bee and hoping she has left something valuable behind. She has. In abundance.

Peter Macrow
Hobart, 14/2/02

Walking the Tideline is available for $12.00 (including postage) from the publisher: Pardalote Press, 44 Bayside Drive, Lauderdale, Tasmania, 7021