NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW ON-LINE

A strangely paginated zine. Title page and reverso (contents) are un-numbered. Pages are then numbered 1-12 and 14-35 with text spilling onto the inside back-cover.

The opening poem THE VANISHING ISLE by Derrick Buttress (Nottingham — all poets duly placed in their location) starts with a quote from John Sparke, 1564. Geoff Stevens on the next page though brings us firmly uptodate with CORPORATE IMAGE though nostalgia lingers:

	Once this city was the centre of Europe
	but now you can't be sure where you are
	until someone asks you to pay an entrance fee.

If Richard George had just called his poem MELANCHOLY, I might have praised it for its musicality, but he calls it HAIKU: MELANCHOLY. It clearly isn't a haiku, being far too wordy and poetically contrived for that genre. Genuine haiku don't need titles to explain them. When will people learn that poems of 17-syllables are not the same things as haiku?

Short poems do work without being labelled as with Morgan Kenney's THESE TOO, although its tone was rather too sombre for my taste.

Ian Emberson who also provided the cover illustration, has a poem based on a painting by Murillo. I've not seen the painting but that doesn't distract from the strength of the poem: —

	You lean and watch
	in the expectancy of boyhood
	....

	will there be girls
	   swinging flamed skirts
               and throwing roses?

There are some disturbing pieces such as Gareth Rowe's long poem A NORTHERN ASSEMBLY and Craig Cotter's account of gay Asian immigrants in Los Angeles.

Five pages are taken over to some well written reviews of seven collections

All in all it is a slightly idiosyncratic magazine but eminently readable.

The cartoon on the cover of #9 says exactly what we all know of every publisher's office ever. But you'll have to buy a copy to find out what.

As usual with LINKS in the lower margin of a couple of pages are quotes about the world of writing and writers. Where space allows there are also illustrations — an excellent block abstract in particular from Jessica Freeman.

Within this rich mix editor Bill Headdon tries to place the poems according to themes; at one time the link being a cathedral, another the colour yellow. Which I am not convinced is a good idea: the superficial link possibly detracting from an appreciation of the poem's internal workings.

Plenty here, however, to overcome that reservation. Every time, for instance, I come across a Robert Etty poem my admiration grows. Here for a sonnet about his Mum and Dad, masterfully executed, wonderfully readable. Bravo!

Jenny Hockey's THE PARTY'S OVER captured that weird morning after mix of the strange within the now unfamiliar.

Dan Wyke's reflections on life in THE BADGER were also tellingly caught:

 
	...twisted, belly up, a dog wanting a tickle, 
	though wary, gums exposed, a palisade of claws...

This issue ends with a fulsome section of reviews by practising poets — offering up insights as only they can.

The magazine now only appears annually, which presumably gives the editor plenty of time to gather together a good crop of poems.

Paul Groves at the dentist in THE POEM SPEAKS tries to ease his pain with wry humour. The poem is based around a campaign lauched, we are told, to pacify dental patients by putting verse on surgery ceilings.

Steve Sneyd's poem is strangely entitled THEN THEY BROUGHT IN THE COMICS CODE but actually the poem is a poignant non-comic piece about animals and not being sentimental about them.

R.L. Cook conjures up the music of Mendelssohn, as well as the visual scene in HEBRIDES OVERTURE which begins:

	Sea and sky and

	Fisher folk;

	Crofters working on the land:

	Earth with horseman riding, pounding;
	Highland bloodstream mounting, leaping;
	Highland heart-pulse beating, bounding;
	...

	Up to break the breeze whipped surface,

	Up to swirling
	
	Sea and sky ——