NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW ON-LINE

The first impression I got browsing through Purple Patch was that it seemed like something of a throwback to the good old (or should that be bad old) days of the late 70s/early 80s. Its production values are basic, deliberately so according to editor Geoff Stevens, who in his 'GOSSIP COLUMN' — more about that anon — says that though:

Martin Holroyd [of Poetry Monthly] did a great job producing [the special centenary issue of] PP ...lots of you said that you preferred the old individual and untidy presentation that went before.

The quality of the poetry is mixed. Some of it, such as DAYS by Jeremy Worman, is very good indeed:

	what are the ways of days
	do days remember what and how

	no, we make days live and mean
	arrange the notes they give

	calendars, months, reunions, years
	we are masters of the days

	yet, as moments twitch and pass
	we're the ones who lose face

	as days rub us white like bone

	AUTUMN IN THE PARK

	October has finally expired.
	Autumn is all decay.
	The ditch is clogged with leaves,
	And backs up into overspill.
	Trees are skeletons,
	Bear witness to forgotten ritual.

	The Summer house is padlocked,
	And tennis but a memory.
	Starlings mark out octaves on the telephone wires.
	The pond slimes over.
	November is a tang and tingle of mist,
	And dusk a wine-draught red,
	Refrigerated.

	Michael Newman

As well as these fairly conventional poems there are a few it's difficult to know exactly what to make of. Stephen Owen's CHANT FOR VLADIMIR LENIN 111 for example would, I think, have mystified even the KGB. Although of course they'd probably have thrown him in the Gulag anyway, just to be on the safe side.

In the light of what I said earlier about the slightly anachronistic whiff I got from the magazine, an interesting poem is Derek Kortlandt's MANDELVAZ:

	how are the smarmy fallen
	the modernisers, the dapper deriders
	who bludgeoned us with jargon
	these smart performers
	who have reformed us
	with a sighing scorn
	have had the their fingers
	in the ethical till
	but lecture us still
	for our lack of style.

poems about the angry young men of the 50's and 60's.

It's difficult to take a number of poets, give them a theme such as "Angry Young Man" and ask them to write on it, and to come up with a homogenous issue. But the editor, Geoff Stevens, succeeds admirably with this issue of Purple Patch.

The result? An unusual hybrid, hard for the reader to know where the lines are drawn. The solution? Just relax and enjoy it because it's a marvellous, fascinating read.

ANGRY YOUNG MEN was a title given to a group of British writers of the early 1950s, notably John Osborne, Kingsley Amis and John Wain. Their work was marked by irreverence towards the Establishment, disgust at the survival of class distinctions and privilege, and contempt for what they saw as the narrowness and drabness of postwar life. It is epitomized by Osborne's play LOOK BACK IN ANGER, and its central character, Jimmy Porter.

The editor tells us in his opening essay just who these angry young men were, how they came to get this name, and the names of other writers who could also have been included in this category. Stevens tells us that these writers,

. . . wanted to keep what was best and change that which was bad.

Women never have young minds. They are born three thousand years old. — (A TASTE OF HONEY, 1959, I, ii).

	Was Larkin watching me in 1963?
	I didn't, however, wank over Chatterley,
	and I had no designs on a Beatles' LP.
	My idea of musical heaven
		would have been tea
		with the Temperance Seven. 

	Mr. Saturday night,
	throwing up outside the bar,
	has his brains in his pants
	and Sunday already howling
	in his wardrobe.

	Me, pissed as a fart,
	after thirteen gin and limes,
	jiving solo on the table tops
	in tartan trews —
	later, on the free bus home
	hands and knees up the aisle

	No.
	The real reason
	you never hear women going on about the 50's
	and men never stop is . . .
 
	It was the last time they were in charge.

I'm familiar with Purple Patch and at a fiver for three issues it is a real bargain. The first thing to strike me was the variety of styles which I feel adds richness to the overall production. You will find narrative, humour, imagry, rhyme, descriptive poems, music and some deeply moving pieces.

A fine example is competition winner WEATHER REPORT (about a missing child) by A.J. Cartmel-Crossley. Rain is forecast from start to finish. It really touched me and reminded me of the tragic Bulger case in Liverpool. From verse 1:

	on the news
	another tragic mother airs her fear
	for a vanished child who's disappeared
	wondered [sic?] off, or snatched or worse

	on the news
	reporters clamour, microphones jab at passers-by
	white-suited searchers prod the ground with sticks...

	now senior coppers stage-manage their concern
	and spot-lit parents parade their pain again...

	and grave-faced clergy simper hollow phrases
	florists do good business

	Just wait till you look in the mirror

	you can't remember how you got home
	but you recall a sharp slap in the face
	after groping somebody's wife.

CHICKEN SMILE by Christopher Taylor was moving

	here i am
	an alien once again
	with a note pad and pen
	looking like a relic or a grandparent
	tomorrow I'll come here with my son
	i often do
	he'll wear the chicken smile
	and I'll feel as young as him

	you're a cheeky thing croaking this early
	very much less than perfect pitch

	...
	you got away with it just like
	Michael Crawford in Phantom Of The Opera.

	writing volumes of air is not my style

The last two poems I want to mention are LYING TOGETHER by A. David Brown and DARK SIDE by Belinda Cooke. Brown's poem questions habit and his longtern affair. It opens

	we lie together, and we speak, we lie together

	The paint is always a brown that was once cream
	...
	They must have had mothers — moments
	...
	Where food is always tinned or frozen