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my haiku books

forgiving the rain
(Snapshot Press 2012)

A multifaceted memoir of home: of children and parents, joy and fear, dreams and desires, and, ultimately, the inherent wonder of ordinary lives. These contemporary haibun combine the narrative power of prose with the epiphanies of haiku poetry to question and explore where home is, how we recognise it, how we leave it, and how we find our way back.

Bashō did this. On his narrow road north. He wrote what he saw and what he felt. Wound his prose around his haiku, studded his creative world with perfect places. Lynne Rees is on the same journey. These are scenes from a life: childhood, adulthood, passion, age, joy, pain. Her haiku are headlamps. Her prose flowing water. I couldn’t put it down. Peter Finch

It had me laughing, very moved, fully involved and also (since Lynne and I seem around the same age) immersed in the reference points along the way! I'm in full admiration of the haibun form and its possibilities in the hands of an adept such as Lynne. Really beautiful. I teach life writing and will be pointing my students to this book as a great example of how to approach auto/biography - but I recommend it to anyone. I know that I'll be going back to it again and again. Fiona Owen, Writer & Teacher






another country - haiku poetry from Wales
(Gomer Press 2011) co-editor

The first anthology of its kind to celebrate the literary wealth of haiku and its associated forms created both within Wales and by Welsh writers internationally from the 1960s to the present.

This is an important contribution, not only to Welsh literature in English but also to all writing of haiku and its related forms in the English language. Paul Griffiths

£9.99 from Gomer Press: orders@gomer.co.uk

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Consolidation & Simplification

Since January 2020 all my work - haiku writing, poetry, prose, imaginative and non-fiction writing - has been posted on my website   Lynne Rees .  Please feel free to share anything from this archive, or my main site, but I'd be grateful if you could credit me as the writer and link back to the source.  Thank you 🙏 Lynne 

haibun ~ Playing Lego Minecraft with Morgan

There’s only a portal of black obsidian between the zombies and lava in The Dimension of The Nether and The Overworld where Steve is standing and I am counting his sheep, cows and pigs. But we really shouldn’t be hanging around when night is about to fall and mob attacks are imminent: Blazes and Creepers, Spiders from The Cave, all ready to descend on The Farm.  autism spectrum my nephew names all the monsters It’s time to lock up the animals, he says, time to close doors and windows, so I turn Steve around and notice he’s clutching a tiny baguette, something that fills me with unaccountable joy: that in this world of sharp edges and danger a boy has placed Bread in a man’s hands and they are carrying it home.  Presence 63,  March 2019

haiku commentary

deeper shadows where the walls meet... autumn rain – Mark E. Brager, The Heron's Nest, Volume XXI, Number 3 (2019) I imagine a corner, two walls meeting at right angles. I can see the depth of shadow there. If I reach out, I am sure the surface – rough brick or smooth masonry – will be cooler; perhaps because the autumn rain I now notice has started to fall. The places where people meet are more emotionally complex, stepping, as we may have to, from the comfort of the familiar to the challenge of the unfamiliar. Those “deeper shadows” may be rich with empathy and gratitude. Eshadows in corners Photograph by Steven Castledinequally, they may be fraught with conflict and umbrage. Brager’s haiku shifts me from inanimate objects to human experience. I sense loss through the image of “autumn rain,” or at least an understanding, or acceptance, of inevitable change that results in something being left behind. Perhaps change, even for the better, always leaves a