NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW ON-LINE

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Current Accounts
Regency House
Longworth Road
Horwich
Bolton
BL6 7BA
UK
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cheques payable to "Bank Street Writers"

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This page last updated: 1st August 2005.
Current Accounts #20

Current Accounts is the journal of the Bank Street Writers, based in Horwich, Bolton in the north west of England. Many of the contributors are local but writers from USA and Spain also feature. This issue is largely given over to the winners of the Bank Street Writers Short Story and Poetry competitions, along with interesting comments from the adjudicators. The prize winning entries give a good idea of what this journal is about — unpretentious writing about ordinary life. I found the short stories more engaging than the poetry. The first placed story: THE GOLDEN VISIONS OF BRIAN THE BUILDER by Alexandra Fox is a beautiful story of a man who can see into the heart of things and visualises the connections between people — sadly this is diagnosed as mental inbalance and he is taken away to be 'cured'.

As well as the prize winning pieces, this issue is full of

the usual mixture of new work produced by writers locally and worldwide.
This includes FIVE PROSE POEMS by Georges Godeau, presented here in the original French and in English translation by Kathleen McGookey, enabling the reader to compare the translation with the original.

From the rest of the pieces, my favourite was J H Yonce's JUST THE JOURNEY, with its eerie evocation of travelling in the dark:

	Only the rumour of anonymous land
	And a wet road seen slickly
	In the reaching headlights' fans.
I also enjoyed Linda Benninghoff's encounter with nature in THE MOOSE:
 
	Then the moose swung,
	its dark back lifted
	against the cold sky,
	leaves and brittle twigs trembling.
This journal gives a very nice snapshot of what is going on in the writing world in the northwest of England and beyond.

reviewer: Juliet Wilson.