NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW ON-LINE

This a very nicely produced glossy number. It opens with a poem by Wanda Barford on SHOES:

	To-day I sent off all your shoes to charity

The poems are all well-crafted, some are quite formal, whilst others are more experimental in format. Graham High contributes a telling poem about snow-shifting in Russia.

There is an interview with Peter Bennet one of the new co-editors of Stand. I enjoyed reading this but was dissapointed by Bennet's in memoriam poem to Norman MacCaig.

Margaret Moore's poem STUCK IN THE FORTIES ends appealingly:

	Dredgers from the cement works scattered gulls.
	Bottles and tins and small ambiguous bones
	littered the cold glaur sucking at my feet.

This is certainly one of the more interesting and worthwhile magazines on the contemporary scene.

This selection is a satisfying and sometimes exhilarating read, with not one unworthy entry in its seventy-plus pages of poetry. There are beautifully suspended lyrics such as Antony Christie's YOU ARE SITTING

	soon I will bring you 
	fireflies 
	and the humming bird with the red throat 
	and you will stand in meadows 
	blazing with hawkweed 
	beside the blue lake.

Styles range from the stripped-down exactness of works such as P Meek's THANKS to the more densely textured but still disciplined tone of, for example, Anne Murray's VILLAGE CHURCH. Each poet is clearly an accomplished, intelligent and individual voice.

For readers who haven't yet sampled OTHER POETRY, this high-quality magazine is one to pursue.

This issue is a massive 112 pages, which makes it extremely good value. It contains the sad news that Evangeline Paterson, the magazine's founder died on March 8th, 2000. The remaining co-editors have every intention of keeping the magazine going. In addition to a host of fine poems, the issue has an interview with Anne Stevenson and half a dozen pages of excellently-written not-too-short reviews.

A well produced magazine full of interesting and accomplished poetry. Many of the poets represented will be familiar to the habitual poetry magazine reader; others, to the credit of the editors, are not.

CLOUDSCAPE COLOGNE by Ruth Terrington (from the latter category) caught my eye; a nice balance between the descriptive and the philosophical — the showing and the telling.

	Cold sunset — just how cold, you can't begin 
	to gauge from a hotel room: clouds reclining 
	like angels, like the presence in all those stark 
	holy pictures we've sought to deconstruct —
	witnesses, scrutineers, tally clerks 
	who keep the score but rarely intervene

Robert Drake (a familiar name) has written a powerful and beautifully constructed poem, THE LAST LOAD. Many of Drake's poems are set in the rugged Cumbrian landscape and this one is no exception; a poignant narrative marking the end of an era: the ousting of the horse by the machine.

	The team of eight, exhausted as though by 
	Coalesced centuries of horse-work, 
	Stalled on the cruel final incline 
	at the railway bridge over Station Hill. 
	Numb and deaf to goads and curses 
	The great horses sagged in their traces, 
	No heart for more; winded, spent.

One hundred pages, glossy cover, spine, sixty-four poets, one article, a few reviews — how do they do it for the cover price? Maybe the Northern Arts grant helps, but don't let that make you think they don't need subscribers.

The poets are published in alphabetical order, so whilst that makes it easy for one to look up a favourite contributor, it precludes any chance of building up some sort of thematic sequence.

There's a pervading sense of sadness about many of the poems whether it is as a tourist witnessing the aftermath of an accident (Denise Bennett) or a divorcee his ex's happiness without him (Roy Blackburn). It doesn't have to be like that — compare Martin Cox's

	In Acre Brook, death
	of easily forgotten Daisy;
	computed in milk gone to waste
	or fleshpounds lost at market;
	not wrangled over with traders.

	... the sky suddenly collapsing in swathes
	dark as nettles, pleats and cloaks of water as the
	men work to finish the job, the mud jumping
	up at them, arms and shirts drenched,

	their faces running, their hands damaged,
	the knives like fish silver, the terrible nakedness
	of each carcass where the scream had lived,
	the rain like shards of glass between dark poplars.

Richard Kell's article A NOTE ON VERSIFICATION might be seen by some to be advocating writing poetry in the form of chopped-up prose. I'm not sure I fully agree with some of his premises, but if he succeeds in making more poets think more carefully about the structure of their poems then it will have done a good job.

The discovery of the issue for me is Hannelore Dalton, whose work is new to me. THE MOONLIT GARDEN sent shivers down my spine —

	...
	Sometimes a bird chirps, drowsy in the branches
	And spiders creep along damp, fungied walls.

	On empty paths pale patches shudder, shiver.
	...