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At 70p (including postage) SMOKE is great value; it eschews editorials, essays and biographies to focus on art and poetry. This issue features figurative and abstract artwork by Frances Wilson, and a wide range of poetry from new and established names.

Most of the poems are conversational in tone; Steven Taylor's SAINT GEORGE OF ENGLAND gives us the dragon's voice —

	I am no more a flapping dragon 
	With fiery breath than you are
	An avenging angel. It is eight o'clock
	On a wet October Monday. The East
	Enders are just coming on television.

Ursula Curwen's poem needs to be quoted in its entirety:

	Recently
	I was pierced.
	Deliberately, 
	purposefully.
	I'm not telling you
	where or when.
	I'm not saying
	if it hurt
	or if it's healed.
	Does that make it more
	exciting?

Charles Johnson's GOD MAY WELL BE A BIRD and Joan Poulson's TRANSFORMATION take nature as their subject, while Lisa Hannah represents the terror of political unrest in SIEGE.

You can't go wrong with SMOKE; it has something for everyone at a price we can all afford.

Smoke is a slender magazine whose editors, Dave Calder and Dave Ward, clearly go in for quality. No bad poems appear here, and some must be called excellent. Generally speaking, the issue is slanted towards existential questions — "Who are you and why?", as Auden puts it.

Sue Dymoke writes about

	becoming Silver Birch

	your limbs to the
	supple
	trunk

	slip in
	and out
	of bark.

The poets I have mentioned are all female. Perhaps traditional feminine behaviour — including sacrifices of one's own needs and ambitions — has left its mark, so that women even today tend to find it a bit of a challenge to think their own thoughts and feel their own feelings.

Even more interesting in this issue is an emphasis on strong imagery, often bordering on the surreal. This has been unusual in British poetry, though there are now certain signposts pointing the other way. D. Zervanou, for instance, a Scottish writer, has been styled a surrealist. In Smoke there are not only "doors that flapped like ghosts" (Eve Jackson), but a diva who "gestures like treacle", and whose "want is citrus scented" (Carla Jetko). Either she, or the silence around her, is, by a metaphor, presented as

	a pulsating black
	widow's abdomen

	ozone, ivy and
	spider.

	You can't weigh me with feathers and books.
	You can't count me with clocks.
	I am light as a thousand candles.
	I am thin as a spy in the house of desire.
	...
	I change with the weather, play the dominoes
	of night and day. 
	...			 
			My hair
	is the colour of the wind when it's not there.

	Look; the clock does not tell you the time,

	Wet grass in the eyes of the Christ child,
	nails in his smile. His mother feeds him with wisdoms
	and in another place soldiers commence their training.

If there was a prize for the funniest and most charming poem, I'd hand it over to Matthew Sweeney without the slightest hesitation. His offering, POEM SPOKEN BY A CAT TO ITS OWNERS' FRIENDS WHO ARE FLAT-SITTING, is a spoof on — or pastiche of — William Carlos Williams's famous "plum confession":

	I have eaten 
	the chicken
	you had on the sideboard
	defrosting
 
	and which you were hoping
	to roast
	and serve with wine
	...

If the clue was not on the inside cover — Liver House, Liverpool — Smoke 51 has all the hallmarks of the Liverpol Poets: humour, witty anecdote, few adjectives, unpredictability, sharp clear images. It definitely does not have: metaphors, complicated structure or metre, rhyme pattern or staleness. By skill, luck, or good editing, these poems also avoid the in-joke, gossipy atmosphere that can ruin much Liverpool poetry.

There are 15 poets with one poem each. In CHARLOTTE BRONTE GETS A LAPTOP by Carole Bromley is the best-structured poem I've read in ages. A helter-skelter-speed story, with a suprise in each line, impossible to guess the next snippet. While being a pastiche of the Brontë family, it also brings them to life and would make you want to read all their books again. Any teacher would find this poem a God-send for the Eng. Lit class, bringing the nineteenth century bang into the twenty-first. First verse:

	It's grand for those mornings
	when you wake to the bullets ricocheting
	off the church tower, the groans
	of Branwell going cold turkey,
	Emily's infuriating cough.

	Tabitha's banging porrige pans,
	Ann reaches for a spitoon
	and through the kitchen door
	come the unmistakeable tones of that curate.

In more serious vein, Kershti Halls depicts a child's discovery of that vegetarian moment in COW GIRL:

	The cow stood in the field
	contemplating....
	as the air clung with moisture,
	and it definitely
	felt like rain.

	...she points
	at the thick, red lump of steak.
	Daddy where does it come from?

	and the room is crumpled and warm
	as an overused bed before morning has broken and the night is
	still wound tight as the clock tick-tocking over the
	shadowy hall..

Further along any Liverpool street there's always a mad old lady:

	the shiver of air
	that hung around her door
	— those clenched-heart dares
	to ring her bell and run away.
	Her home was up a clutter of stairs,
	a twist of darkness, where the tap tap
	of her stick tipped your spine.
	Black skirts. Black shawl.
	fingers like heather roots.

	It was said she knew the small-talk
	of the moon — so many words
	chased us along the street
	till we'd hurtle in a heap ...

One of the most difficult subjects to write about is a tree, ruined forever in the cliché stakes by that sickly song. But Jean Sprackland has taken it and made it new, specific:

	Nothing to get done
	but to suck in light,
	translate it into green.

	Early on it was uncomfortable....
	The tips of my fingers forked and forked again,
	shivered into leaf.

Neil Campbell in SHOELACES pinpoints that instant where children and adults change places with

	Now Dad can't do
	his laces and
	Mum lies to me.

	Bob from next-door has just popped in.
	He's going to walk me through the blackout
	to fetch the fish and chips.
	He looks quite smart as a Brylcreem Boy.