I was born in South Africa in 1941 and, looking back, realise my solitude (only child, single mother) was the root of all enrichment in other directions, necessarily spending school holidays on safaris with my beloved multilingual grandfather inspecting schools in the remote interior of Botswana, or later on horseback with a Austrian doctor attending mountain clinics in Lesotho. My galleon grandmother had known Cecil Rhodes, and Jan Smuts and was related to Elizabeth Barrett Browning and her family had had a significant role in the life (and death) of George Eliot’s stepsons. All this extravagant narrative washed over my head, and I believed none of it, until recently when the evidence of all of it came to light. I discovered that much too late. However independent minded women… and the virtues and necessity… of independence loomed large from an early age.
In early years I shuttled between rigid boarding schools trying to be Roedean and the wild freedom on Noel, my horse in Lesotho. Later consolation was to be found in literature, and two inspiring teachers, one English— The Metaphysical and Romantic poets, the other Theology and comparative religion.
At University after indecisively sampling five faculties( such a rich choice of culture, where did one begin?) I fell into Psychology and Zoology under both the seminal palaeontologist Raymond Dart and the ‘father of embryology’ B.I. Balinsky. Then marriage to a marine biologist/photographer involved deserted mangrove islands in Mozambique scouring mud flats for supper (lavish sea food, lobster, crab, and coconuts and cashews for an exiled ( (and bored) five star chef to turn into dinner- salary was a mattress and his helping) but starved for company. Then the sophistication of the Max Planck Institute with Konrad Lorenz in Bavaria, living in an 11th Century Mill with an unrepentant Nazi landlady (who, by then, should have been extinct but was alive and well and playing Schubert.) Then it was Florida (in love with an air-conditioner) until the experiences that led to Involution sent me into exile. En route I spent time waiting for a divorce in Yucatan where I met the girl commemorated in 'Shadow' I landed in Southampton with five pounds , two small children and an academic manuscript…
The academic underpinning of Involution was offered in lectures on Saints and Scientists at Bristol University, while building a home and an arts and concert hall for chamber music, raising four daughters, and living in Somerset, which continues. I have now short stories to attend to. They sit easier.
<p><em style="color:rgb(24,24,24);font-family:Georgia, serif;font-size:13.63636302947998px;line-height:17.563634872436523px;">After centuries of religiously motivated war, the world has been split in two. Now the Blessed Lands are ruled by pure faith, while in the Republic, reason is the guiding light—two different realms, kept apart and at peace by a treaty and an ocean.</em><br style="color:rgb(24,24,24);font-family:Georgia, serif;font-size:13.63636302947998px;line-height:17.563634872436523px;" /><br style="color:rgb(24,24,24);font-family:Georgia, serif;font-size:13.63636302947998px;line-height:17.563634872436523px;" /><span style="color:rgb(24,24,24);font-family:Georgia, serif;font-size:13.63636302947998px;line-height:17.563634872436523px;">Children of the Republic, Helena and Jason were inseparable in their youth, until fate sent them down different paths. Grief and duty sidetracked Helena’s plans, and Jason came to detest the hollowness of his ambitions.</span><br style="color:rgb(24,24,24);font-family:Georgia, serif;font-size:13.63636302947998px;line-height:17.563634872436523px;" /><br style="color:rgb(24,24,24);font-family:Georgia, serif;font-size:13.63636302947998px;line-height:17.563634872436523px;" /><span style="color:rgb(24,24,24);font-family:Georgia, serif;font-size:13.63636302947998px;line-height:17.563634872436523px;">These two damaged souls are reunited when a tiny boat from the Blessed Lands crashes onto the rocks near Helena’s home after an impossible journey across the forbidden ocean. On board is a single passenger, a nine-year-old girl named Kailani, who calls herself “the Daughter of the Sea and the Sky.” A new and perilous purpose binds Jason and Helena together again, as they vow to protect the lost innocent from the wrath of the authorities, no matter the risk to their future and freedom.</span><br style="color:rgb(24,24,24);font-family:Georgia, serif;font-size:13.63636302947998px;line-height:17.563634872436523px;" /><br style="color:rgb(24,24,24);font-family:Georgia, serif;font-size:13.63636302947998px;line-height:17.563634872436523px;" /><span style="color:rgb(24,24,24);font-family:Georgia, serif;font-size:13.63636302947998px;line-height:17.563634872436523px;">But is the mysterious child simply a troubled little girl longing to return home? Or is she a powerful prophet sent to unravel the fabric of a godless Republic, as the outlaw leader of an illegal religious sect would have them believe? Whatever the answer, it will change them all forever… and perhaps their world as well.</span></p>
I met a girl on a beach in Yucatan in 1968, and as the sun was setting on the landscape and her life she told me why she was there. A story almost too much to bear. Years later after the birth of my youngest daughter I remembered that girl, and lived through her anew. Her story was too large for a short story or for less than poetic myth. It was the story of that mythical time. I have written it for her; to commemorate her courage and to remember what we all lost when the sun went down on the sixties. The characters that carry her through this book were missing then, and are all fictional. I came to love those that cared for her, as though they had.
<p>‘I was utterly awestruck by the writing skill and breadth of imaginative evocation.....poetic, elegiac...almost unbearably intense...sensuous imagery from both nature and modern urban living...musical, both rhythmic and assonant...sustained dramatic tension within a simple everyday story....the superficiality of the beauty salon is a very potent metaphor....’ Alison Jakes (Poetry Circle)</p> <p>As with a highly literary novel, this ambitious story makes demands upon its readers. As with most modern poetry it deserves to be read and re-read….. The story is a vehicle for some impressive poetry. It is highly emotional and transforms the ordinary protagonist into an archetypal figure of suffering motherhood. ‘Speech must now grow from silence and the stones that cockle the black backs Of women in pre-history, left alone with the consequence of men’ There is religious dimension too. Throughout there are subtle references to the Christian Nativity, and on another level it tells of Christ’s birth and Mary’s suffering in modern terms. It contrasts the cruelty of the girl’s Catholic mother, with the compassion of her Jewish landlady. There is implicit criticism of the hypocrisy of society as a whole….The poem has a social purpose. Katherine Knight (Real Writers)</p> <p>Philippa Rees is as an immediately distinctive and striking poet who writes with unfashionably – often brilliant – painterly verbal play and colour, oozing with a sensuous love of language. Rees’s almost tangible style dazzles with imagistic chiaroscuro; stark contrasts of light and shade, subtext and texture: This ripeness of verbiage and intrinsic musicality inevitably bring comparisons with Dylan Thomas (particularly the densely descriptive, rumble-tumble list- passages of Under Milk Wood): But this is not to detract from Rees’s individuality, which, throughout this book of poetic narrative interspersed with colourful dialogue, is palpable and often beguiling. She is prone to the lingering aphorism that is imaginatively her own— Lethargy, that toothless crone, skims perpetual indifference from the cream of richer care. …the drifting necklace of leaves that swung from the throat of shade For my part, I read A Shadow in Yucatán mainly for its poetry, its play with language, image and sound, rather than strictly trying to follow the actual narrative. Approaching this book with a sort of Negative Capability, I experienced it in terms of descriptive impression, verbal effect. In this respect, A Shadow in Yucatán is disarmingly beautiful (Alan Morrison, Editor The Recusant)</p> <p>The back blurb calls ‘A Shadow in Yucatán’ a ‘distilled novel’ and it is –a home brew, raw and omnipotent! Rees makes extraordinary the sorrowful ordinary of an unwanted pregnancy and the resulting difficult decisions. She celebrates the sense of community, despairs of family and counts on the generosity of strangers. She explores problems and finds solutions – hard through they are to take – in unexpected places Through it we enter a world as real as we are, but as foreign to us as a bad dream. This book is a must for any intelligent reader! (Independent Reviews)</p>