NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW ON-LINE

Well this is a different kind of poetry magazine! It's printed in an attractive lilac and white format. A montage of photographs, typed and hand-written poems, musings, sketchings, capturing the essence of life as a creative. This is the "Celebrities Toilet Roll" issue. There is a colour-co-ordinated piece of toilet paper neatly folded and inserted through the middle of the first inside page. The subject matter is wide and varied, along with the illustrations. Take a model out of a Fifties Kay's catalogue, a line drawing of gymnasts and add a photo of a workman, a steam train and a view out of a window on to a sports field and you get the general impression.

It sounds too much to take in and yet amazingly it all works.

Favourite pieces for me are by Colin Cross, who provides us with COOL GENIUS, DYING and PARROT. I like his no-nonsense approach. It would go down a storm at readings round where I live. Idris Caffrey never fails to deliver either:

	LITERARY EVENT IN LONDON

	A mistake from the start
	All the "glitterati" are here
	quaffing Chardonay -
	patting each other on the knee.

	I search the hall for someone
	who looks a bit like me,
	who's outside the circle's cosy coterie
	but they're all reading English at University.

	As I leave it's starting to rain
	and I'm glad of it -
	an instant return to reality.

	and I stop and imagine
	dark nipples and smooth legs
	as she moves away,
	female and hidden
	in that oppressive black
	        and her Nike trainers

A5 stapled with 12 pages including the cover. It says on the back:

You've just received another edition of the London-based poetry Aporism and artwork magazine that is published by Page 84 introducing his work and the work of occasional guest poets and guest artists.

	A cigarette or two, the
	ceiling fading away ... and
	out!  Some half-an-hour
	sleep or just a little more,
	afterwards migraine galore.

	we stood for it there and here —
	but see he musta gone, did I tell you that much?
	Monday man for everyday but sometimes not,
	ah sometimes not, wrong wrong,
	all these others, they weren't part of it!

It says on the back cover that it is unpredictable, and therefore it is of interest.

When I first opened this magazine, two things struck me. Firstly, it has been beautifully crafted — visually it is strikingly different from the usual small press magazine with acres of space around each poem. The second thing brings me to the initial problem: it's a nightmare trying to find the poems hiding away on each page. I put Page 84 down and went off into something else. The visuals had got the better of me first time through.

Coming to the magazine again for a second time, I found poems hiding. And beyond the knowing jokes of "Alien" etc. there actually is information about the editor and the origins of this magazine — you just have to look hard to find it. Then, beneath the typographic screen/mask emerges the poetry itself. And, yes, there are some familiar names here — a couple of poems by Dee Rimbaud for example. From one of these, I particularly liked:

	With each moon passing 
	I sing into the sand some,
	and then some more.
	Secretly, in the mirror,
	I rearrange my face,
	scrub down dead skin,
	rub smooth worried lines.

OK, so I seem to be going about the form — but the form does seem to be the focus here — and for the first few looks at this magazine it seems to get in the way. It's the visual equivalent of trying to hear a poem, which is masked by lots of background noise and music. It's a shame the poems weren't actually given the room to breathe.

Finally, feeling that there was something that I just wasn't grasping, I followed the weblink in the magazine to look for more information. It's worth a look. It puts the magazine in a context — this is an art experiment, issued every 84 days. It's a fascinating experiment — I'm going to spend more time exploring the website.

Conclusion: it took a bit of work to get there, but this magazine is well worth a look!

This, THE WALL2WALL POETRY ISSUE is red. The eye recoils. Squinting, the reader presses onward, determined to glean meaning from this melange of scrawled letters, flung on the page with the abandon of untrained chimpanzees. The eye strains.

Words, upside down, streaming along the page, slanted sideways, bits of sentences. The eye recoils again, straining. Pieces of faces, a man without eyes, heads, a lamppost.. And after all this effort to read the red-rimmed text, to discern meaning among the far-flung letters, finally words begin to emerge from the paper, the slick, glossy paper that looks like it's been bleeding for a very long time.

And the reward for this effort comes: Christine Rowley:

	Babylon's burning
	The world is torn
	into death and destruction.

	. . . how sweet and welcome
	the unanticipated stillness is.

The first response to such a thing is to toss it to the wastebin in disgust, wanting more substance and even structure, and the second response is to dig it out of the wastebin, lick off the strawberry juice, and realize that it isn't about the poetry. It's a collage of careening meanings, simple thoughts slipping on their own bloodstains.

And so of course it's red.