NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW ON-LINE

This issues's editorial lays out a challenge for readers to submit their own requirements for a book of poetry having taken to task a reviewer for commenting the poems

meet most of today's requirements for popularity. Observant, intelligent, piquant as to subject matter, assured as to tone, it can be read at a sitting, and above all is performable.

	...But I chose instead
	The house of poetry
	Under its rowan tree,
	Half ruin and half grave
	With green grass like a wave,

	Nettles and moss for bed,
	And its people coming and going
	Like seeds the wind might bring,
	Like words in the wind's song,
	Their tenancy not long.

	Do not compose merely as modes dictate.
	Write from your heart and soul and mind. Let joy
	and sorrow in. Harvest emotion. State
	that you will look at each poetic ploy
	you choose to magnify your words with care.
	Work at your craft. Read widely. Feel the flow
	of lines, of rhythms and of rhymes. Despair
	not if a concept stays in embryo.
	But do not have conceit enough to think
	that every piece you write is written well.
	Yet do not be self-deprecating. Drink
	deep of inspiration, thoughts gently gel.
	And if you write a poem that truly flowers
	make that the standard for the succeeding hours.

	Writing a poem is dead easy,
	Not a bit like real work.
	Pick any old theme —
	Love jealousy, childhood,
	Choose words at random,
	Burgle an Oxford dictionary.
	You needn't bother with rhyme
	Or rhythm or scansion,
	That's all old hogwash.
	Add slang, sex it up,
	Grammar and spelling are out.
	Who's afraid of T S Eliot?
	Take my advice, start now!
	Soon you'll be sprinting
	To Faber or Cape,
	Winning prizes, bursaries,
	An Arts Council hero,
	Hammer of the Philistines.
	Even you can do it.
	Writing poetry is dead easy.

	...If only you knew what rubbish a poem 
	Can start from — for poems aren't fussy whence
	They spring: the yellow of dandelions growing
	With goosefoot and burdock by a wooden fence;
	
	The scent of tar, mysterious cries in
	The night, a patch of mould on a wall...
	And already, slowly the poem is arising,
	Tender, impassioned, a joy for us all.

Phil Simmons expands on his poetic influences from first impressions (Dylan Thomas, Eliot, Kerouac, Shakespeare, Donne), established (Logue, Hughes, Mahon, Pound, Wallace Stevens, Baudelaire) and contemporary (Cumming, Ken Smith, MacSweeney and Gordon Wardman) and argues that

we should give clearer emphasis to those authors who try to give us a more engaged, less selfconsciously clever manifestation of how things are.

Back to the poetry and ACUMEN provides a mixture of the sentimental, eg Roy Cameron's A DAY IN THE LIFE OF A DREAM:

	A dream that comes by night — is one we call mare —
	a horse that gallops us through a far and fallow field,
	with nostrils all aflare and hooves that pound
	in our head, on a ride that never seems to end
	until it throws us down into a muddy river bed
	and finally our eyes are opened.

	But a dream that comes by day can tiptoe in
	as warm as sunlight on the face,
	creep up from behind and tickle where you least expect it,
	untie those knots of worry with fingers of light and hope
	and hypnotise like a feather floating on a duckpond...

	The sound is building, a long way away,
	at the edge of things. A slow falling,
	a breaking, a ruin of air.
	You can feel its tired momentum
	behind the traffic. Somewhere inside

	you know what it means. For so many.
	You can't imagine, but you know.
	And the radio's voice, the church bells,
	the scratch of breath in your chest
	are all just dialects of silence.