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Walking the Tideline,
by Lyn Reeves
Pardalote Press, 2001.
54pp. RRP $13.00
From
the PostPressed web site:
this "long-awaited
first collection from Lyn Reeves does not disappoint. Her gentleness,
perception and understanding of her environment, which we have
seen evidence of in her editing for Famous Reporter, shine through
in her own… our haiku literature is enriched by her presence."
Janice
M. Bostok
" Some readers may think of Lyn's tideline
as a metaphor for life, with a perspective that sometimes seems
flavoured by Zen, but is always in the haiku spirit".
John
Bird - HaikuOz
Review, by Peter Macrow:
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 $13.00 (including
postage) from the publisher, Pardalote Press,
Phone and fax: +61 3 6248 8496; email areeves@netspace.net.au
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