NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW ON-LINE

OTHER POETRY is one of the most handsomely produced of the small poetry magazines, and how they can afford to sell it so cheap is beyond me. There's good work here. My favourite being the translation by Ouyang Yu of a poem about learning English by Hou Ma. Other stand outs are THE BOOK OF SHIPS by Anthony Suter and the life-affirming AND BLESSED BE BISHOP VALENTINE by the distinguished veteran (born 1918) Derek Stanford. Stanford once gave a privately printed booklet of mine a kind review and it's pleasant to be able to return the compliment. Nice one, Derek.

Andrew Waterhouse died last year. He was a young poet of great promise. There are two of his poems in this collection. BUTTERFLY ON STAINED GLASS is an allegory of the soul's release. The poet carries the trapped insect into the open air and lets her go free..

        her unsteady wings
        catching the light again over celandines
        and gravestones and on towards the sea.

Apart from the poems, OTHER POETRY contains a useful section of short reviews and a valuable set of critical notes from one of its four editors, Richard Kell. Kell has sharp things to say about contemporary fashions in versification. Why do so many poets (including so many good ones) sin against natural speech rhythm when they come to chop their poems into lines? How is it acceptable to end a line with an adjective and begin the next with the noun it qualifies or similarly split verb from pronoun? He characterises the practice as unskilful and unloving, and, dammit, I agree.

With over 90 poets represented as well as 18 pages of reviews and brief biographical details of the contributors this is a brilliant buy. The poetry is of a very high standard but a few are worthy of special mention.

Ganga Prasad Vimal's poem IN THAT DREAM translated from the Hindi by Us Sapne Mein is an excellent illustration of the illusive quality of dreams, their contradictions of the longed for and the terror and our inability to pin them down. This is summed up in the lines

	That was a dream, looking beyond that
	a series of nightmares only.

MICHAEL MAINE AND THE DEMON OF YOUTH by Raymond Humphreys is a disturbing tale of youthful nastiness made even more frightening by the mantra

	Michael Maine (not his real name).

	a pyramid of peaceful courage

	armourers with shining shirts of bullets, refuellers, bomb handlers,
	patchers and pluggers of holes with their dope and canvas, metal and rivets,

	all in their hats, their suits, their dresses of several ages, a pyramid
	of peaceful courage, and not forgetting the dog — unless it's a masterly cat.