NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW ON-LINE

I don't know how many poetry magazines there are in current existence in this country, or these countries, seeing that they both spring up like mushrooms after rain and, conversely, melt as snow in sunshine, but let's say somewhere around the 250 mark, Acumen is one of the stayers, and I think it would reckon itself to be amongst the more notable ones. It has certainly smartened itself up considerably over the years (and this is not a negligible asset), is a convenient if substantial size (this number has 120pp and a semi-stiff glossy pictorial cover), is immaculately printed and on quality paper: a pleasure to handle.

The reader is perhaps expecting that after this encomium about relative inessentials there will be some reservations about the quality of the contents — but I should first list briefly what these are: in the present number, somewhat over 40 poems; articles on a variety of subjects ranging from the life of Baudelaire to the demise of the Muse; reviews of various lengths depending (I surmise) on the putative importance of the poet under review, e.g. four pages on the complete Lowell, a paragraph on lesser lights (or unknown lights), plus a final two-side round-up from the magazine's long-standing reviews editor, Glyn Pursglove. There is also a correspondence section, largely devoted to a nitpicking exchange of letters concerning a previously-printed translation by Charles Hobday of a Goethe poem, but which ends with a letter by Avril Bruten (Oxford) reporting a series of memories about the late Kathleen Raine and leading into an excruciating poem in memory of a speech day long ago at which Raine spoke:

	Well, how our Grammar could not let you speak
	As you meant to speak as you spoke...

	The older one gets, the more one wonders how
	We might have done things better.

	My father's father played the bones
	With a fine unmusical frenzy

	A learned judge has said that this is true:
	Alone he took his life, put out his light
	And we heard the evidence too...

	He lost his self-esteem, his bleakness grew

	Thrown to the wolves. His expert life seemed through.

I have already quoted from the poem by Avril Bruten about Kathleen Raine which follows her reminiscence — which contains such gems as

	K.R. You become a poet by being a poet

	While, outside, the throat-click and choke
	Of trams tramping down sewer-flood grime,
	Bubble-gum, Spanish Wood we chomped and
	The spat-out welk-bones [sic] from Tubby Isaac's stall...

	I prayed it was a nightmare: but I knew
	those strange marks where his bill secured my neck,
	the feathers in my hair, the pain.. .the pain...
	were real.

	To bury the hatchet is, unfortunately, a unilateral act.

	Shopping nowadays at Christmas — sometimes I think Scrooge was ahead of his time.

	We are never bored when we are in the company of an enemy.

	Shoots burst forth, buds harden
	in the kindergarten.
	There are snowdrop faces.
	Crocuses learn to tie laces.

...a criticism I have recently and frequently heard levelled at much British poetry — have we really anything to say?

	Trumpeting their virtues the politicians lie
	Before whatever judges their silver pieces buy.
	Newsreaders spout out platitudes we all hold dear...

Interspersing clusters of poems are articles, mostly brief, on a variety of subjects mostly to do with poetry (though Anna Adams chooses to write a review, in evocative prose, of an R.A. exhibition ILLUMINATING THE RENAISSANCE). I was sorry to learn from James Aitchison that the muse is dead, having tried to celebrate her continued life and vigour in poems of my own. But Aitchison's attempt at defining the elusive creature puts his thinking on a different wavelength from mine, and no wonder I persist in pursuing her:

...the muse could have been ...a set of neural networks that were encoded for an aspect of self and identity but were difficult to activate because the natural domain of that set of networks was the nonconscious mind.

And the reviews? Of the two matters with which reviews should concern themselves, telling you what is the subject matter and scope of the poetry, and suggesting what's good and bad about it and whether it's worth reading, that is description and evaluation, these reviews on the whole are stronger on the former than on the latter. If you are hoping, from the longest review here, by Fred Beake on the new collected Lowell, to discover why you should invest in its round 40 quids'worth and 1186pp and why the prolific poet is worth reading at all, you might be disappointed.

What makes Lowell interesting is his constant shifts of direction.

...wrestled with his craft as few do today

.. .reinforces the sense of a life moving perpetually into the changeable, evoking the thrown-into-the-worldness of our times — the acceleration towards the unknown,

A substantial magazine, then, seriously edited and compiled by the long-term editor, Patricia Oxley , and as well worth reading as it was to review. No doubt the quality of the individual numbers of the magazine varies, and perhaps this one does not show it at its best. But lively, varied and serious, it has to be judged. I would have preferred more of a cutting edge to its contents all round, and it would need an article to explain what I mean by that; but perhaps a definition is implicit in the contents of this review.