A Shadow in Yucatán

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A Shadow in Yucatán

A Tale Sung in Exile

Category:	Poetry
Author:	Philippa Rees
Publisher:	Trafford
Price:	£6.50
ISBN:	141209764-9
Pages:	110
Reviewed in issue:	7

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 that need to be made. She celebrates the sense of community, of the despair of family, and she counts on the generosity of strangers. She explores problems and finds solutions – hard though they are to take – in unexpected places.

The poet’s use of language is strong. We are never far from the people she writes about: Only one, just one more soda from be poor, / the undimmed Pepsodent poor – ‘The Specialist’. This use of dialect juxtaposes with her own poetic style: A dryad is drawn from the earth / to spindle the light from the anxious trees… – ‘The Storm’. Reading A Shadow in Yucatán is exciting, enthralling and earthy. Rees is an incredibly able poet. Why has this book has turned up as a self published piece? It is strong, it is professional and it is impossible to put down.

The images that accompany the poems unfortunately let the book down as they are not thought-provoking enough in the majority of cases – something I would expect from a book of this calibre. However, this is partly redeemed by the cover, which places the story firmly in the reader’s mind. 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!

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