NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW ON-LINE

There's something special about receiving the latest issue of Presence, for the poet and the reader. As a reader, there's always the novelty factor which, if you're lucky, sustains the interest for the duration of the book, the discovery of a new voice, a new version of the world. The best poems, those that remain in the memory, such as the following tanka by Stephen Atkinson:

	our tune
	on the radio;
	your photograph
	returned to the sideboard
	face down

From the poet's point of view, work contained in this collection comes from a wide variety of poets in countries such as USA, New Zealand, Australia, India, Japan, and others, as well as a wide selection from the UK. The individual poems: tanka, haiku, senryu, linked verses, and haibun accumulate and are ordered as the selection takes its final and unique shape and colour.

The thematic pattern that traditionally runs through such collections is predominantly autobiographical, root-tracing. Many of the poems are concerned in one way or another with dislocations, internal and external, that are the subject matter of haiku and like genre, such as the following haiku from Robert Gibson:

	earthquake
	all day flocks of birds
	circle the city

The issue is witty and playful, containing all the hallmarks of poets we, as readers, have come to recognise: taut diction, honed and unexpected language, ironic presentation of urban life, coupled with elegance. Poems from such poets as Bullock, Jorgensen, Lilly, Attard, Figgins, Galmitz and a host of others, whose work one sees and admires in other magazines.

The haibun of Jerry Kilbride, Helen Robinson and others, are fuelled by their perceptions. The meeting place of poetry and narrative is paramount in haibun. Kilbride lets poetry slowly unwrap reminiscences of his grandfather in SWANS:

At the edge of the bridge it was all but impossible not to think of my grandfather . . . swans and my grandfather.

	  Flour blows where we
	can't go   towards mountains 
	     which guard Tibet

	through the heat   of the market, wheeling   an edam cheese.

	city street
	the briefest touch
	of a stranger's hand

. . . we take a closer look at the life and work of a contemporary English-language haiku poet. Our victim is Claire Bugler Hewitt, but look out because next time it might be you.

	the flicker
	from his dynamo
	cycling to the fireworks

This is a magazine of haiku. The first two pages are the winners of the magazine's competition for 2003. The judge's report follows and it sums up the winner in terms that relate to all good haiku The best haiku convey more than they say, and in doing so they defy logical analysis. This is the case with the winning poem

	summer's end —
	a boy skips a stone
	to the other side