NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW ON-LINE

A broadsheet folded up into a handful of poems and six very short prose pieces.

The prose pieces deal with a variety of issues/themes; they are so short that their compression and cutting of corners makes them seem, perhaps unfairly, either amateurish or pretentious.

There is an original and clever poem, YOU LIVE FAR FROM THE STATION?, by Andrew Mayne dealing with the problems caused in a relationship through not sharing a common language:

 
       And while I'm trying to line up most of this
       in my head, I still can't stop wing-mirroring
       our botched intro, wondering whether I can
       somehow take us back and finesse a joke
       out of making it clear that I was only
       asking how far you lived from the station
       and not complaining about the distance.

                       with my chin tucked in now
       against this hill — its arctic wind and hail —
       it's difficult to look up to lip read you.

The Brobdingnagian Times is a broadsheet edited and produced in Ireland by well-known poet, editor and reviewer, Giovanno Malito. Issues I've received in the past have contained a variety of forms: haiku, poetry, prose, editorial notes, cover art and quotes from famous writers and artists.

#19 is the small press editor's issue containing work by editors from several countries: Ireland, UK, USA, Canada, Rumania, NZ, Italy, Australia, Belgium and Japan. Many of the pieces in this issue are poems, but there is a thought-provoking prose piece by Joe Speer, Beatlick News, USA, and a letter to the editor from Jennifer Bingham, USA.

In making his selections for the broadsheet — obviously a painful process of eliminating worthy poets for the sake of essential inclusions — Malito has had to balance several priorities. First, he may have wished to show a variety of good poetry from different countries in order to give the reader a notion of the scope of key editors of small press journals. Second, the selection process must have been very difficult because of the abundance of material. Third, he has included some known poet/editors, but has also introduced vital work from lesser-known writers.

Poems can be looked on as a series of moments representing some of the best and worst parts of poets' lives. They make it possible to go back and relive the original experience. Consequently it is my firm conviction that poems should not be used for anything superficial. This does not mean they have to be serious all the time; but something serious should be present in the background contributing to the reader's awareness of the vagaries of our world.

One such poem that caught my eye was this from kevyn knox, Experimental Forest, USA:

 	gary snyder come down
	from the mourntain
 
	hoo hoo chant in upper sierras
	running naked in ancient rainstorm
	breathing howls of modern coyote
	this is it boys we are on our way
	smoking clouds brushing dirty ankles
	lunatic hitching ride off Cliffside
	slide down waterfall chanting hoo hoo

In The Brobdingnagian Times, Malito delivers a far-ranging package in the small space that he allows himself. The fact that these poets are all editors themselves should speak for the quality of their work: it's seriousness, or lack thereof.

I should say at the outset that, when it comes to THE BROBDINGAGIAN TIMES, I am definitely biased. Although I've never actually met its ubiquitous editor, Giovanni Malito, I have long-since been a fan of his, and have on a number of occasions been a contributor to his publication.

Now that's all out in the open where it rightly belongs, I can honestly say that I found this issue (all poetry with the exception of one solitary prose piece) to be a typically stimulating and eclectic collection of work by a wide variety of small press writers from various parts of the English-speaking world. Among the highlights was SHE SNEAKS A LOOK AT HIS NOTEBOOK by Kim Taplin, a writer whose work I was already to some extent familiar with:

	There was stuff about
	books he had read, stuff about travels south.
	"When a man loves a woman", she read,
	and wondered if it was a thing he'd only
	dreamt of, or if it was someone but not her.
	"Rains of rainbow" made her smile-
	that was like him, as were his jottings about
	tracks in Lancashire and the Scottish Highlands.
	But what could make of the strange question she found
	"news of a CLEAN DREAM?" bordered in black?
	Nothing perhaps beyond the old knowledge
	that the skull next to yours on the night pillow
	is another star
	whose light reaches yours if it does at all
	after a long journey through the dark.

Another highlight for me was Andrew Mayne's RE-READING HIMSELF: a poem in which he takes us with him as he re-revisits the novel he left abandoned in the bottom drawer, all those years ago. Mayne shows us that, among his many other obvious talents, he has a sense of timing which any stand-up comic would be proud of:

	Although he finds it hard to disentangle
	whatever that 'something' is from the nostalgia
	for a woman he has, almost literally,
	not thought about for years; yet as the final
	chapter plodded to its justifying end
	he comes to within an ace of marrying her.
	An evening with his Glenn Miller 78's
	and some salvaged snaps of her confirms that,
	even though half-cut, he can still jack off...

Of course, my appreciation of this particular poem could well be a guy/bloke/fella type of thing, and it might perhaps leave some female readers feeling a little unsatisfied. I don't know. I've never been very good at reading these situations. But either way, his use of understated humour is absolutely first class. And I'd be interested to see how he approaches other subjects.

The short prose piece EARTHWARDS FROM ANDALUCIA by A.S. James, is very striking and definitely leaves you wanting more. Take the opening paragraph for starters:

My stomach slumps earthwards. As surely towards the earth as a badly slung load of cork on a donkey, carried through the forest in the month of August. For I am fifty and sour and empty and dying.

I have lived long enough to have the right to hear the braying words like prolapse, fibroid, diabetic. I shall stick them in my scrapbook alongside democracy ...

	I couldn't hear a thing.

	I stuck my fingers in.

	A little damp,
	not unpleasant.

	So began
	my shell-collecting.

That said, its editor Giovanni Malito is certainly one of the unsung heroes of the Irish literary scene. And by far the best thing about his publication is its internationalist outlook. Of the twenty contributors to this issue, eight are based in the United States, eight in various parts of Britain, three in Ireland and one in Germany. For American or British-based publications this sort of geographical spread might seem fairly commonplace. But for an Irish-based publication it is pretty much unheard of. And it is this that makes Giovanni Malito stand out from the crowd in an Irish literary scene, where, for many, internationalism seems to mean little more than joining the desperate scramble for invitations to lecture gullible American students at the University of Syracuse (or wherever) about 'what it means to be Irish at a time like this', or some such mind-numbing banality. Being an Italian-Canadian editing a small-press publication based here, Malito is probably to a certain extent forced to do his own thing. And long may he continue to do it.

A3 broadsheet with poems from around the world: UK, Ireland, Italy, USA, New Zealand and four poems by Miroslav Holub translated from Czech by David Young. Familiar names such as Dee Rimbaud and Davide Trame.

For this reviewer, the most interesting piece of writing was Matthew Geden's short article MEETING THE GOBLIN. Geden contends that we have become too obsessed with linking famous poetry to the biographies of the poets instead of using poetry to enrich our own lives — which is what poetry is all about. A well known example he cites is Ted Hughes' BIRTHDAY LETTERS.

A poet's work goes beyond biography or a simple message, and indeed "does not always convey the message it intended". An "intervening spirit" or "goblin" (usually described as "the Muse") is what magically transforms language and ultimately "transforms our view of ourselves."