NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW ON-LINE

Mixture of poetry and short stories. Mystery was the theme for most of the stories with Elaine Cleveland’s DISAPPEARING ACT offering a mystery at a mystery books convention. Richard Reeve’s brings a taste of a US private eye to England in a kidnap thriller LITTLE ALFRED. In Janet Overmyer’s I SEEM TO HAVE THIS GUN a detective gets to work out which of the two sisters stabbed a detective writer with the plot successfully twisting between the two sisters. An elderly woman, Stella, enlists the support of a carer in her dilemma over whether to tell her adopted son who his real mother is although the title, HONOR IN SECRETS, already tells the reader Stella won’t tell and then Liz Morgan spoils the story further by letting slip that the son is in a coma after a car crash and the life support system is going to be switched off thus dispelling any tension. Although Martin Gerrard’s RUNNER’S HIGH has a predictable ending - the guy gets the girl - the story has several twists and sympathetic characters that hook attention so the reader wants the ending to happen.

Unsurprisingly for a winter issue, snow was a recurring theme amongst the poems, eg in Susan Atkinson’s gentle THE SNOW HAS A TANG OF ITS OWN:

	and snow slithers
	from winter’s sodden skies
	I catch cold kisses
	with the warmth of my tongue
	tasting the changing season

	to the fall of snow piling higher
	than the hooker’s skirt
	as she shivers her way into my heart.

	The darkness of snow a brightness seemed.
	And dark upon it seemed the moon.
	At a pane, a child’s face
	Although in darkness, seemed a brightness
	On the darkness of a lighted room

Finally Robert D Hoeft offers a new season in SIGNS OF SPRING:

	The stumbling falling of clumsy flies
	The pollen delivered between the eyes
	The muffled buzzing of the wannabees

GREEN'S MAGAZINE sells itself as "fiction for the family". If you're thinking this means stories for kids you'd be mistaken. There's one story here, about an apprentice fireman, that children would enjoy, but otherwise everything is levelled at an adult readership. The "family" tag actually means something like no sex, no profanity, no violence.

In consequence, though subject matter like divorce and mortality is featured, there is an air of mildness about the whole enterprise. A lot of it is steeped in wistfulness and nostalgia. In WHO'S NELLIE FOX by Greg Tuleja a middle-aged dad remembers summer days playing baseball as a kid and the friendship he struck up with a sour old coot with a heart of gold. Pretty syrupy. THE CHILD by R.L. Cook returns a workaholic to the idyllic Scottish countryside of his boyhood and a magical encounter with his younger self. Somewhat tougher is Carol L. Mackay's EARLY BIRDS, in which a deserted wife gets rid of the bric-a-brac of her past in a garage sale.

The first story in the collection is probably the best. Jenni Van Patten "likes to write about ill-fated events happening to good people" and $19 MILLION LOTTERY WINNER EATS HIMSELF TO DEATH is a case in point. There are no surprises, the story arc is fully described in the title, but Van Patten's gentle black humour (if that isn't a contradiction in terms) is idiosyncratic and engaging.

GREEN's also prints a good deal of poetry. R.G. CANTALUPO's GOVERNING THE BIRDS is a pleasing anecdote in verse. Ralph Cunningham's BATTLESHIPS isn't fully achieved but its governing image of the stormy sky as a naval battle is compelling and unforgettable.

You get just under a hundred pages for your money. The illustrations are off the peg and only loosely connected to the text. Some of the writers are skilful, others awkward, but I was consistently entertained and even the weaker stories held my interest.

Published in Canada and established for thirty years, this issue contains a well-balanced mixture of short stories and poetry. Among the 50 or so contributors Joan Ritty, who writes both, is a long standing contributor now in her eightieth year. Her ABSOLUTION about a wild garden, contains nice imagery:

	Wild garden,
	remnant of a love unpardoned,
	but long remembered.
	Wild throng of crimson rose
	brambled as an unforgiven quarrel
	kept embered.

The poetry is varied, there are more than 40 dispersed throughout the 96 page book, many by regular contributors. Most are short and among those I particularly like is THE LONG AGO ROOM by David J. Gravells, a reminiscence of evacuation in World War 2.

THE POMEGRANATE EATERS by Nancy-Lou Patterson, paints a delightful picture to capture the New Orleans scene in 1952:

	Black as crepe bouquet, three gleaming youths
	pick with their pinklined fingers the jewelled
	seeds of a pomegranate, lick the juice
	with their languid, rosy tongues...

	I loved my Spode, and my china toad, et al. But grieve?
	I'm packing a trunkful of jeans and tanking up my vehicle
	then I'll step on the gas and head out for the magical.

	Your massive bulk seeks out
	a shallow eddy where salmon
	sail sleekly up river and you swipe
	with claws sharper than man's
	fish hooks, slicing the currents
	to salvage a long awaited lunch.
	But men hunt you down!

	They have no time
	for the sweet tones
	that rise and sail
	out over the lake
	freed by the saxophone player
	who sucks sunbeams
	into the gold runnel
	and then through pursed lips
	utters the last other tunes
	kissing summer goodbye.

A quarterly Canadian publication out of Saskatchewan entitled Green's Magazine sits within a bright orange autumnal cover. The 39 poems are interspersed between 10 short stories. This particular issue is dedicated to the memory of the victims of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks. One of the many seasonal poems entitled, AUTUMN, by James E. Bennett says it all, in brief, so well:

   October is a brilliant yellow
   and orange falling hopelessly
   in such a splendor of color.

   ...

   It's only one more repetition
   in a time of birth and death,
   unwilling to become perfection.

DAMAGED GOODS, by Robin Adams parallels the Christmas season of giving and not expecting. It's a "good feel" story without the O'Henry punch. It's unfortunate that the author passed on after the story was written.

One story well crafted and stirring is THE MEMORY BOX, by Eleanor Terese Lohse. Each word is well meditated and developing. It will surely click in the reader's mind when one reaches the surprise ending.

The stories were well written, by seasoned adults, mature in every sense of the word. Ordinary situations depicted in a memorable way takes that passage with age and experience. The issue spans the gamut of love, aging, pets, divorce, and death. It was an enjoyable bedtime read and is highly recommended.

A very pleasant magazine, carefully arranged so that each story is separated by a clump of poems. No reviews, no articles. All the writing is accessible, the poems are quiet and unassuming, the stories all have beginnings, middles and ends in that order. Anyone looking for cutting-edge avant-garde writing had better look elsewhere, but that doesn't mean the stories and poems are not well-written, because they are.

Just occasionally lines leap off the page and stop you with a jolt as in WRITING NATURE'S JOURNAL by Robert L. Tener:

	Far behind us is the present.
	We seem to remember
	our once flint tipped arrows.

		All of a sudden,
	    so many young punks
		became very old.

A high-quality magazine that left this reader glad he had read it.

David Green's weighty publication promotes the prose and poetry of writers from Canada and beyond with considerable care and a professional production. A particular style and editorial voice have developed, creating what must be a national institution in the small press. No space is wasted in the 98 pages of this issue which includes nine short stories, interspersed with numerous poems, each accompanied by brief biographical details.

Many of the stories have domestic settings. Some can be deceptively comfortable, like Celine Rose Mariotti's YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND. A couple's quiet retirement is briefly disturbed by the reappearance of the wife's old flame, but as Nadine says:

you and I have so much more Jeremy.

There is more humour in Joan Ritty's BEYOND THE OBITUARY, where, Esther, the enterprising sixty year old protagonist, plans to ensnare a wealthy widower. Her ambitions are as materialistic as they are romantic and their naivety is revealed with a fine balance of absurdity and pathos. As she learns that she is only one in a queue of ingenious suitors, so she reveals the contradictions of her desires:

Anyway, she could not have married a man with that voice — she had done that once already and didn't need to be reminded.

She took down a painting of the new city hall Norman had financed and the medal he'd won for raising a record amount of money.

Two stories are, encouragingly, more ambitious than the others in their scope and in their tone. In YIELD TO MATURITY, Tim Shay successfully employs a more complex narrative structure that satirizes while challenging the reader. Randall Garrison, on the other hand, creates a disturbingly dark picture in THE OLD BATS.

The poetry — and there is plenty of it — is a more mixed bag. The editor is commendably broad-minded in accepting a wide range of styles. Some of the simplest verse works well, such as Brian Burch's MEMBERS OF THE SAME PAST or Robert D. Hoeft's teasing response to being asked, 'What is the opposite of chair?' In several poems, there is an engaging quirkiness and humour. A fastidious speaker of English is caught out smartly by Ruth Latta:

	and she pronounced the "ch" as in "chipmunk".
	With great delight I sang:
	"O. how I wish again
	I were in Michigan."

          Did I grow out of ad jingles,
          bobby socks and crinolines?

For the British reader, perhaps the most memorable poems are those three which unfold the great textures and large landscapes of the New World. First, Harry Brown celebrates the later life of 'Hop'. IN DEED AND TRUTH is crammed with more than enough of the kind of ordinary imagery which crystallizes a sense of place:

          Mornings of coffee biscuits, eggs, and ham,
          Evenings of coffee, biscuits, spuds, and beef.

		... onions and feel their skins shed
          And juggle them in the dust-speckled air
          Where flypaper coils hung golden with bodies like raisins.

		... he sleeps as summer shrinks
          our startime to an interlude each day.

		... saving the native daisies all the length of June;
          the black-eyed susans and perennial sweet peas.