NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW ON-LINE

Close-typed A4 sheet with news on one side and new poems on the other. Reviews are short and informative and this issue acknowledges Richard Caddel's sad death. Four poems distinctly on sci-fi themes, Heys Stuart Wolfenden's SPACE MADNESS

	...The instruments are a delight to touch
	Smoother far, than flowers a clutch,
	The drive that powers faster than light
	Irradiates energy, and glows at night...

	...the outrageous dream of a more innocent time;
	repair our careless ravaging.

	... the shadow prowlers
	of the singing void
	and sense the
	enchanted sleepers
	in their metal moon...

HANDSHAKE: THE NEWSLETTER OF THE EIGHT HAND GANG is, by its own estimation an irregular publication. It is devoted to science-fiction and science-fantasy poetry.

Physically, it is a simply produced, unprepossessing, double-sided A4 sheet, available from the editor for the price of an SAE. Side one contains news and market information for genre poets, side two five poems. The poems are of a quality that belie the newsletter's simple format and its exceptionally affordable non-price.

A SUITABLE CASE FOR REDUCTION IN LEISURE TIME has Geoff Stevens wryly critiquing the seminal theories of Erich Von Daniken, from whom the phrase "chariot of the gods" garnered much of its cache in the annals of Ufology. Von Daniken claims that in pre-human pre-history aliens landed in the Nazca Desert in Peru, gouging tracks as their vehicles touched down. Stevens feels that any obscure arrangement of lines observed in the back gardens of Britain are not only not there because of ancient space craft, they are there

	... for no reason at all
	but to satisfy the disarranged and over-active brain
	of someone with bad taste
	that has somehow managed to avoid sectioning
	under the Mental Health Act
	and allowed to run amock in suburbia

	On a big Star Trek get-together,
	a Lancashire mimick boards The Voyager.
	The captain asks in prissy New England tones:
	'Youre not an alien... Youre English, arent you?'
	"Yes, but dont tell anyone"...

	    tell me
	  the gods
	still watch

	Yellow from the sulphur-cycle
	Thorn tipped tendrils
	Waiting for the big winds
	For dust carries the spores
	Far as the Tharsis Montes
	With memories of flash floods
	Half a billion years ago
	These are the blooms that wither
	In the long shadow of Olympus

	a black obsessive passion,
	flailing through this hateful void

	this darkness so bleak,
	a surreal void

	I am chained here,
	my heart so gaunt and dead.
	torment

by looking over the shoulder of the present moment into what has not yet happened, but struggles to be born like Yeats' slouching beast,

can, paradoxically, also help us see our present, our past, more clearly.

The irregular double-sided A4 of poems and poetry news edited by John F. Haines again shakes hands with readers. There is always something or someone in it not elsewhere normally seen mixed with known sources and poets. Recognition of the loss of K.V. Bailey (1914-2005) SF poet and critic and Japanese POW in WW2 mixes with another two booklets from Krax Pubns (HOT STUFF by LINDA COOPER and THREE STAR CHAMBER by Steve Sneyd of SF senryu) and a senryu flier ELEPHANTS AND CATHEDRALS by J.C.Hartley also with SF themes.

On the obverse poem side, an untitled poem by C.DESPARDES tells of a cosmic marathon chase of Korvaleen's spacecraft

	from one end of the cosmos that bound you
	Past the zone of the farthest known sun

This 4-page leaflet is devoted to poetry and poets from the UK and USA, and has a different slant on the usual form and understanding of poetry.

Some of the poems are rather difficult to understand, as there does not seem to be any point in them.

However, that apart, it is good for those who like their poetry on a slightly different level.