Lynne Rees

Lynne Rees
Biography: Lynne Rees was born and grew up in South Wales. She worked as a currency dealer in the Channel Islands and moved to Kent in 1985 where she ran her own second-hand and antiquarian bookshop for 12 years. She's the author of a novel, The Oven House (2004), a collection of poetry, Learning How to Fall (2005), and co-author of Messages (2006), a volume of experimental short prose. She founded and directs AppleHouse Poetry, an independent project supporting poets in the South East of England through a programme of workshops and masterclasses.

Lynne is the recipient of a Hawthornden Fellowship and the University of Kent's Faculty of Humanities Award for inspiring and imaginative teaching practices. In 2005/6 she represented Kent in 'Words Unbound', an international writers' exchange with France, Belgium and Ireland. It was during the visit to Ireland that she became interested in contemporary english haiku. Her first published haibun, 'Collection', was selected for the anthology big sky (Red Moon Press 2007), an annual publication celebrating the best in international english language haiku writing. www.lynnerees.co.uk

[editor's note: the Haibun is a combination of prose and haiku, invented by the Japanese monk Basho. The Haibun is concerned with 'showing', rather than 'telling'.]

4 Haiku

sunlit garden
when did my father grow
an old man’s neck?

(Frogpond - Fall 2006)

a black umbrella
blows inside out — too late
to say sorry

(written as part of the Umbrella Project, 2006)

the wind pushes
across an open field
the bleat of lambs

(from Haiku Calendar 2007 - published by Snapshot Press)

newborn
he stretches his legs into
all this space

(Blithe Spirit - 16/3/2006)

1 Haibun

'Collection'

Each drawer slides out in silence. First the gradations of white – snow, ivory, pearl – then the browns, greens, shades of fleck, all arranged on sheepskin, named, dated, and geographically placed in a fading scrawl. Clutches of plover, ptarmigan, shrike, and here, a golden eagle’s non-identical twins – feather-weights in my hands, no albumen or yolk, just cradles of air with tiny man-made holes. While around the room a weight of books: engraved and coloured plates, breeding times, conception, birth, flight. The histories of lives they never lived.

the room darkens
a scuttle of sparrows
in the eaves

(from Simply Haiku vol 4 no 4 (November 2006) and big sky (Red Moon Press 2007)

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