NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW ON-LINE

I really enjoy these newspaper-format poetry magazines that seem to be a speciality of the USA and Canada. The only one anything like it in these islands I can think of is Poetry Scotland. In tone, style, contributors (Lyn Lifshin and Eddie Harriman are her) it reminds me of Bogg.

Amazing interview with Earl Coleman. He's 87 years old and the pace of his industry — writing, teaching, endlessly reading — leaves me longing for a quiet lie down. His poetry is terrific too, as exemplified by this recent poem, LIGHTLY PACKED

	My tracks are clear as crystal and connect my dots,
	two inform feet, the cane for exclamation point.

	Anyone can follow them, my steps; anyone at all.

	Families were glued to the ghostly blue
	of their TV screens,
	The hair on the backs of their necks
	Risen by better scares than the likes of me

This is a large, attractive newsprint publication, with twelve pages folded to A3 size, with plain black print, simple monochrome illustrations, and poetry arranged in three columns per page. The only prose passages included are a fascinating leading-page editorial on the impact the current Bush administration has had on American publishing, and the final page's description of how a particular poem came to be made. Otherwise there are pages where poets are represented by a single poem each, interspersed with pages devoted to the works of a single writer. In spite of its potentially distracting format, with many poems crowded on to one page, the large fonts and generous margins mean that the poems do not intrude upon one another.

Not surprisingly, poetry by this many hands is uneven in quality. But what is curious is that, in my view, the best poetry is almost uniformly by those poets whose works appear singly. Without exception the POETS CHOICE authors — that is, those represented by several pieces — struck me as self-indulgent in theme and stylistically repetitive. By contrast, all those pages with a range of writers include poems of real merit. For example, there is Bruce McRae's poem, ARBORETUM with its driving momentum and unapologetic self-reflexive phrasing:

	If Rachel comes aflutter through the storm
	I'll be in the arboretum sowing seed
	and she'll say, brother please,
	then I'll be pressed to answer yes,
	what is it girl, you see I'm busy ...

	They found the skeletons side-by-side
	in one grave: lover, woman
	and cuckolded husband;

	...
		... The whole
	tableaux a token of neolithic taboo:

	Home smells like nothing

	I've known many beaches,
	always wanted one of my own.