NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW ON-LINE

Poetry, prose and reviews plus an editorial afterword which plugs Tom Raworth, R F Langley, John Lucas, Five Leaves Press's anthology of British socialist poetry and Salt publishing. Next issue promises an interview with Peter Robinson who is featured with four poems here, from THE FLOW

	...Like tears that speckle car windscreens
	after they're parked out under pines,
	water-drops from across canvas
	shop awnings, trickle into the flow
	of thoughts, being barely awake,
	thoughts of the famous town skyline
	with neon switched off in the small hours...

 
	When you meet them face to face
	They look as tough as their words
	On the written page
	Strutting their stuff at local bars
	Half-way through a drunk
	But when they sober up
	You can always stare them down
 
	Like vampires they don't 
	Like the light
	Coming out only at night
	Bolstering their image
	On alcohol
 
	Little more than failed cowboys
	Who were never invited to the 
	Shoot out at the O.K. Corral.

	...I press my cheekbones, my jawbone,
	trace the silhouette of my face —
 
	solid lines 
	beneath the formless.
 
	The nurses leave their desk
	and hold my hands. They speak my name
	and make me tea.

Perfect bound A5 book. Very nicely produced. There are stories as well as poems. RIPENING, by Marcie McCauley is a love story that hinges on a gay relationship:

I imagine us taking a course in conversational Italian together: sitting side by side, sharing a textbook, quizzing each other on vocabulary lists. Tony's parents only spoke English at home after they moved to Canada. Their first language only slipped off their tongues in holiday telephone calls, in hushed angry conversations behind closed doors.

	The processes of repair.
	syntactical.  Discursive.  Parenthetic.
		Words improve as the weather unsettles
		and the electric light leads us
	out into quadrangles of red hyphens,
	stretching out like Pavlov's dog,
		the way cruelty assures
		at least part of a conversation.

I'm fairly wedded to the idea of inspiration coming from ordinary events and occasions, so a question might be why I'm not simply flooded with promptings for poetry on a daily basis. In practice, it isn't enough to have experiences or memories that could, conceivably, make a poem. There has to be a conjunction of event and memorable phrase.

	Their sweet and stick gum dreaming of music,
	Hallucinating pan-pipes.  Then night how can you give

	That hell-fire sermon? Dear brethren, remember
	This breathing body is my corpse and a living tomb.

	Sins that tasted sweet now taste most bitter.
	Oh, immolating God!  Oh, savage crucifier!

TEARS IN THE FENCE is an unusually well-produced journal of poetry, prose and reviews, published thrice annually. It is very professional in style, academic in format, and has editors based in three continents. In keeping with its serious demeanour, the layout is quite dense, and there is no available space given over to features like advertising or lengthy contributors' biographies.

Still, I find some of the poetry included in this issue a bit uneven — few pieces could be described as falling below the evidently high editorial standards, although a number of the poems exhibit some weaknesses. One such example is Jeremy Reed's HELIOGABALUS SONG FOR COIL. This is an intriguing read, although it is difficult to gauge the narrator's perspective. This is important in a poem where irony and sarcasm may or not figure in lines like these:

	He's a butch faggot
	selling attitude.

	We were put her on this fresco
	To instruct, to strike fear.
	What's become of our world
	When people see past us
	As in a one-way mirror?
	Sliced and boiled for the mystery
	Of faith and transubstantiation
	Now it is we who are unseen.

The journal also includes several very good review-essays. Sean Elliott's LOSING GROUND: IAN HAMILTON'S POETRY offers a number of interesting and informed readings, and Ian Brinton's long essay, CARL RAKOSI: INEVITABLE QUARTZ, is also outstanding.

With a total of ten reviews and contributions by thirty individual poets and prose writers (some, well-known, and others newcomers), TEARS IN THE FENCE makes for a varied and enjoyable read.