A Shadow in Yucatan

by Philippa Rees

Remember Bob Dylan and ‘Boots of Spanish Leather’? He walked these same streets to a bar in Coconut Grove before his guitar was amplified. Remember Joan Baez and Woodstock? Recall the flowers in the rifle barrels and the braziers of Aldermarston? What about Mary Quant, and Abbey Road? If you remember those, then this is may be for you. You will not find them full-bodied, they are long gone, but their spirit is the paper on which this tale is spilt. It will remind you, and help your children to know the country of your past, and why you sometimes seem disappointed.

This distilled novel fits no It is not exactly fiction because the story is true in essence, truer as myth; it is not poetry as such, there are too many insistent voices; it is not history although its place and time are past. It is simply experience singing a song, to the ears and eyes of memory.

It recaptures the optimism of innocence when all things still seemed possible; before the dreams surrendered to the grey men in grey suits. It tells Stephanie’s story but her story is also the story of that golden time. It may make you cry for the self you once were, and if it does it will make you glad.

120 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

'Shooting for the pot'
Philippa's many lives have all the elements of fantasy fiction. Born in South Africa and fatherless, she experienced the wildest parts of rural Africa in the care of her grandfather, often on safari for weeks inspecting rural African schools in a ten ton 'caboose' with a cook, a tracker marksman and a folding table.

The other extreme was imprisonment in boarding schools studying the Metaphysical poets, Theology and the English Monarchy, and always hungry. These solitary extremes perhaps contributed to the need to reconcile the influences of two worlds, African liberty and European culture, leading ultimately to Involution, a life's work that cost her the loss of country family and liberty.

Female emancipation was fed early. Her grandmother was related to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and her great great aunt had had a small but important role in the life of George Eliot; their unorthodox lives were held up as a model of appropriate female daring-do. So it is perhaps not surprising that she should arrive at a poetic narrative to achieve her reconciliation between science and religion, matter and mind.

The 'leitmotif' of her writing is characterized by a celebration of the individual, often eccentric, always out of the mainstream. So her work has never fitted into a Dewey index easily, crossing genres, bridging conventions. It is the gaps in human experience that interest her, and those 'gaps' form both the backbone of both these books and the poetic narratives appropriate to evocative and broad ideas.

After sampling medicine, architecture, classics and fine art she ultimately achieved degrees in Zoology and Psychology. She has lived on far from desert islands in Mozambique, fishing for supper; lectured to mature University students on 'Saints and Scientists' (the theory under-pinning Involution-An Odyssey); designed buildings; self-built an arts centre and concert hall; raised four daughters, and failed to master the cello, her greatest regret.

As a limbering exercise for this work she published 'A Shadow in Yucatan' a story evoking the promise and disappointment of the sixties and has a novel and a collection of short stories (Minding the Gap) in the pipe-line.
She lives in Somerset in her converted barns with an old collie and a long-suffering husband.

The book website can be found here http://involution-odyssey.com/ Her website with odd observations and short poetic comments can be found here http://philipparees.wordpress.com/ Please feel free to contact her with comments questions and observations through the site, or email her(Via website) She would be grateful for welcome contact from readers.

Reviews

[Chris Rose · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Specialist (unequalled)

One of the extended luxuries of reading a book – particularly a good one, but then, at my age, I (we) should know when to abandon the not-so-good – is writing a review: another blank page to dash with blush and beam; pastels afforded by the author – go on, s/he enthuses, five stars in all the colours of the rainbow…

And then along comes Philippa Rees, with A Shadow in Yutacán, and I feel very much like the amateur – where to begin? Where then when begun? Philippa Rees’ A Shadow in Yutacán is the kind of book that… well, I’ve noted Dylan Thomas in passing but he was never this good – reviewer scuffs the clichés infesting the corners of his mind.

I am honestly at a loss. This – pardon me and every reviewer for saying so – is an absolute work of art. And heart. For, make no mistake, Philippa’s heart is at the very core of this work – a work that would be a rank fail if not. We might then forget genre – how ‘winkingly’ witty dear Bob Book-Jacket should inform us our “distilled novel fits no category… is not poetry…”

Poetry, then, is in the ear of the beholder? And persuasive, indeed, it is.
I’m reminded of Arthur Quiller Couch:

"Literature is not an abstract Science, to which exact definitions can be applied. It is an Art rather, the success of which depends on personal persuasiveness, on the author's skill to give as on ours to receive."

Stephanie, the book’s MC, who wakes “to a smouldering afternoon pregnant with thunder”, via pregnancy both of the belly and naivety, comes full circle – and in fact recalls a literary character of my own creation; if only she could put brakes on the rumbling rails of life!

But, for me, the ‘book’ transcends 1960s dreams damned to the frailties of reality; this is Blake’s Innocence and Experience second-done. And this, to repeat the idea of being lost for words, as well as to offer the most audacious of paradoxes, is a flight in animation, where the beauty of Philippa’s poetry becomes mute to the magical carpet-ride of Stephanie’s sensitivities… Come on, then, dear animators, this is the one you’ve been waiting for! Remember what was done with Raymond Briggs' Snowman?

“If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all,” scoffs an Irish wit from spirit. What would he have made of this, though, eh? I do but wonder.

If I were limited to one question only, then it would surely be: ‘Philippa, how long did it take you to write A Shadow in Yutacán?’ And yet I’d refrain, for fear of either answer.

‘Not too long,’ she smiles, ‘it is of my natural pen.’

Then I’ll place down my own forevermore. Consolation being I’ll order more – books! – I suppose.

‘Actually, it was a real slog. A good two years.’

Mmm. Oh, why, by GOD, as I write, has it not yet been bestowed with the honour it deserves?

I will read A Shadow in Yutacán again. And again. And each time will be like the first.

This is a masterpiece.

[Helen Valentina · Rating 5 out of 5]

I came to Philippa Rees' writing via her blog, and from there to her magnificent Involution, which I have separately reviewed. This poem/novella, which was written before Involution, is a more personal and intimate theme than the grand sweep of the later work, but I can still see the genesis of that work in the intricate, finely drawn emotion, spirituality and sense of humanity and nature within this wonderful lament.

It is an ode to a lost age, lost innocence, the narrow visions of changing times but also to the broader, universal love between others - between women together in the world of childbirth and creation, between mothers and children, between the earth and those who walk upon it. Many passages are breath-takingly beautiful. Ms Rees is an accomplished poet. But more than this she delves into the very web and weave of life. Her words will stun you at times with deeper understanding, with epiphanies and relationships you can make between her story and your own life.

Her poetry and prose on childbirth is extraordinary - it links with the earth as a living, conscious entity, and displays Creation recognising and supporting other 'creation'. Here I particularly see the seeds of her thesis in Involution. But here I also see the universal within the intimate, the macrocosm in the microcosm, if you will.

I came upon Ms Rees' writing by serendipity I think, but such a wonderful discovery! I truly believe I am witnessing the rising of one of the greats. I am a fan forever!

[Philippa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I hesitate to rate my own work at all ( or even mention it) but this book is the one I am truly pleased with. It seemed the sixties was such a seminal time for my generation and I wanted to capture it as evocatively as I could. The story told in these 11.000 words seemed to capture the abundant promise and the eventual tragic disappointment; but the sunlight of that time still remains in the memory, as the greatest opportunity lost. Revisiting that time now is almost tragic, because one cannot help feeling that if its joy had been translated into resolve, we would not now be facing the global disintegration.

The true story (told to me on a beach in Yucatan) was mythic in its unfolding, and to honour both its mythic quality and the girl to whom it happened, nothing but poetic prose would do, as musical as I could make it. It was written to honour her.

[Peter Anderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

"But it is easier to think what poetry should be," John Keats remarked, "than to write it -- And this leads me to another axiom -- That if poetry comes not as naturally as leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all." Philippa Rees is a poet as Keats would have liked: poetry comes to her naturally, abundantly, freshly, wonderfully. She is an outstanding poet. Her great gift is for the striking, even startling, image. Yet for me (and now I can slip into the easier mode of thinking "what poetry should be"), the attempt to use the lyric poem as a vehicle, or rather set of vehicles, in the construction of a connected extended narrative runs into real difficulty. Inevitably, I fear. As the Serbian-American poet Charles Simic has pointed out, the lyric and narrative forms are incompatible. For the building block of the lyric is the image, and the more striking the image, the more it works to arrest time. As a perception that pierces to the very heart of things, the image causes us to stop, to think, to feel, to attempt to integrate, sometimes simply to recover from, what we have just seen. The image subverts the very imperative under which narrative operates, that is to say, the necessity to keep up momentum. To the extent that imagery draws attention to itself -- as it should, perhaps -- it retards the flow of narrative. "A Shadow in Yucatan" is therefore something of a sticky story. Another gifted lyric poet, Derek Walcott, gradually abandons the attempt to write narrative (in his case epic) poetry in his immensely ambitious "Omeros", and allows the lyric, for better or worse, to float the poem. Ted Hughes, in his comic grotesque "Crow", probably the closest thing in poetry to a graphic novel, allows the separate poems to stand as separate panels. Philippa Rees has attempted to write a novella in lyric form, but the poetry tends to operate at the expense of the narrative. Nevertheless, read "A Shadow in Yucatan" for the poetry itself, and you can't go wrong.

[Mari · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting evocation of the 'hippy culture' of the 1960s, and the style is reminiscent of T.S. Eliot. I found it slightly difficult to follow as the poetry is quite intensely packed, and I felt the story made a slow start. Then the pace picked up, and it got better and better as the story unfolded. The contrast between what society wanted, and what the girl Stephanie wanted and decided (or drifted into) was stark and was it better, or the same as, the emotional impact if she'd followed society? I wonder if that slow pace was, actually, part of the evocation? That would make a lot of sense. I read this on Kindle, and I would like to read it again, and check my reactions to it. It's not a read-once and rush through piece, it's a slow, though provoking piece.

[Eric · Rating 4 out of 5]

This long poem tells the story of a young hairdresser who finds herself pregnant in 60s America. It is much more than a straightforward narrative of events; it reminds me of The Wasteland in its variety of techniques and voices. The language is beautiful and demands careful reading. If you love poetry, you will love this.