NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW ON-LINE

This celebratory issue starts with a brief summary of the nature and contents of earlier issues, the magazine having appeared in five separate series/formats.

This issue includes poetry, prose and graphics. Among my favourites are John Stathatos with his FOUR REFLECTIONS ON AN ISLAND

	Fossils
		drift
	among blue-brown marls;
	and giant shark
	smashes down through conglomerate,
	feeds in the calcite reefs.

	Our old Renault 4 — which is sinking up to its lug nuts
	behind the piggery, white mould misting its windows,
	a lichen-like efflorescence blooming...

	...bindweed pulls at the wheels
	and fails to move them, ...

		VIII

	Force wins her footing
	incrush curst
	staining the hearth
	hackered door reels
	reels rush rushes

Among the prose I especially enjoyed reading DUST by Brian Louis Pearce.

Yann Lovelock's personal account of the history of the magazine has the strength of being independant of editorial influence. Whilst it lacks, of course, the authority of editorial knowledge, that in the end is probably just as well since a 6th series will be following on.

A literary magazine with a longstanding bias in favour of the British poetry scene's small experimental fringe. And unlike many such publications OASIS at least does its thing intelligently.

Take, for example, the eight poems by American poet Estill Pollock. In places Pollock's work is perhaps a little obscure, but unlike much experimental poetry nowhere does it descend into the realm of complete gobbledegook. And NAMES IN BIRTH ORDER is a fine poem indeed:

	We lived low rent in Juarez, in faded rooms
	in a tiredness of heat near The Avenue of the Virgin,
	night coming and going on the stairs, the curtains there
	half-lifted to a moon outside
	pale and big as Mexico.
	Our lives were ordinary and obscure,
	a narcotic, infusing sameness.

	We prayed for cool breezes, for pardon,
	for primary colours, but when we died
	we found the gods who visit
	come for cockfights in the painted pit,
	not ceremonies of forgiveness. The wager of a candle lit
	both ends, requires a sacrificial etiquette
	we never managed.

	We were the last of our line,
	with all you heard about us true,
	corrupt and unredeemed, the way the wind
	cuts through the fields dry with shadows
	everywhere and nowhere,
	slow circles of weather, of ghosts drifting drowsily
	above the cremations.

Eva, now thinking herself autonomous enough to stalk off into parts of the city I had not yet created, toppled into a canal I had only just deemed possible. She sleeked off into the splintery rainbows of false tides, before I could catch her in my all-weather, all fable net. Perhaps it was the ghost of Elizabeth Bowen herself. But do ghosts have scales and eyes in the sides of their heads? Human ones, surely, don't. The city faded around me to the north. To the nth degree.

	She is sleeping, so it's quiet. Then it snows in the rooms
	Of the house where I live with my love.
	She lies there, naked and white, a breathing stone,
	A big, awkward statue that gets in my way,
	A trenchant weight I must carry each day,
	Each night that her sleep keeps me from sleep...

Lucas Myers was one of those few who were, like me, in at the beginning of Ted's and Sylvia's relationship, and who continued their friendship with Ted until his death. I continue my friendship with Ted's sister, Olwen, as with his second wife, Carol...

more than anything Ted was a good friend, looking for ways to help his friends, and looking for ways to help British society and its verse.

In another, much shorter anonymous review of Gordon Wardman's CAEDMON the magazine's philosophy is, perhaps inadvertently, spelt out:

A highly imaginative and believable tour de force which shows us exactly what poetry can do when it refuses to concern itself with the present-day or with anecdotal autobiography.

	Fingernails and shoes and watches
	I believed were indicators
	Of true character, and so I
	I said I'd look at them more closely,

	But I don't and always notice
	Breasts, tattoos and awful teeth and
	More than anything, the voices
	I know I could never live with.

Oasis is a small, plainly presented magazine that has a gravitas, a distinct tone that might surprise those who tend to look elsewhere for such qualities — in the bigger, glossier journals.

This edition features six poets: Lee Harwood. Simon Smith, Kelvin Corcoran, Andrea Moorhead, John Ash and Roselle Angwin — all contributing more than one poem (there are also two pieces of prose by Robert Sheppard and August Kleinzahler). Each poet writes with an unhurried, finely crafted style, though each has a different angst from which to draw. Lee Harwood's concern is perhaps the transitory nature of all things:

   In the sunken ship's boiler an octopus
   gives birth to her young, stops eating, fades away

   A spring leaf unfurls, spreads to full summer sail,
   then falls in faded glory

   Rain is blue lost and brought back
   Shadows shrink into objects
   This coffee cup, this fig tree, this forget
   Me not blue and white and unmade
   Yellow flowers like paint blotches

   It wasn't the riots or the wrecked stores,
   the bad weather, the football,
   or the new validation of greed —

   no, the worst thing was returning
   after several years to friends
   who had become strangers with white hair,

   and bellies that sagged
   with unspoken sadness.

This is a crisp white A5 booklet of 32 pages, a neat format. This issue includes a review by Luke Bradfere of Nathaniel Tarn's SELECTED POEMS, mentioning that the papers are now at Stanford with those of Creeley, Levertov, Ginsberg. This is where radicals come to rest.

This Oasis has some high modernist prose, for example, in Martin Anderson's THE HOPLITE JOURNALS:

And, from this precise point which we occupy, in that illusory unfolding of our own duration, that movement that annuls us, we repeat the names by which we pronounce ourselves, like a charm, as if they could arrest this endless proliferation of moments which constitutes, sustains and undoes us.

The poem, basically an internal space, is exploited not for itself but what it contains, like the garden in the poem, which is not nature, is economic being copied into a text from an earlier example.

there's a tiny tourist well dressed gesticulating at the heart of the poem both amused and confused maybe it has to do with the stupefying wilderness of words or an interior spectator from another poem

	all the desk clutter
	that makes me look important.
	If only.

	Why why why
	why why why
	whistling bullets

	(sort out the sections
	realign, rejig.
	Make sense!)

	lives washed in magenta

	the hillside slips
	for a second through the pinhole of the pupil

	Chip of a coin, picked up with the quick and eager eye
	of a child — finders keepers, kicking dust
	....
	Scant viridescent held gingerly
	in the morning light, struck from what crude die?
	Grim, peppercorn king, come up for air.

	Sallow twigs were bent in the enamel litre measure.
	Time was as invisible as a glow-worm by day.
	...there's more going on than
	a postcard has room for.

	Before there was an evening one arm
	was already at home as that nightfall
	these headstones count on for balance
	grasp at the small weight you drop inside
	from habit, still splash through oceans
	formed this way before —