NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW ON-LINE

www
The Plastic Tower
PO Box 702
Bowie
MD 20718
USA
ISSN 1066-6044
$2.50
Subscriptions: 4 issues $8
www
Before commenting on this review please read the FAQ page
Home page
Notes for publishers
Want to be a reviewer?
Anthologies.
Books.
Audio.
Magazines.
Software.
Video.
Artefacts.
Web design by Gerald England
This page last updated: 19th June 2004. 		The Plastic Tower #35

The 40 pages in this issue contain a good variety of poems. The most effective, for this reviewer, were the personal poems, usually intense and direct, about the effect on relationships when we experience loss, or change, or other events (such as cancer) beyond our control.

Lyn Lifshin has three poems on the theme of loss —from HE'S INTO SAFARIS:

	   He
	replays the women,
	the deer he let go
	or wounded carelessly
	so it couldn't
	leave fast enough
	for him to chase it
	but worse could
	not leave.
In GOOD NIGHT, Giovanni Malito draws us with surgical precision and careful line shifts into a relationship at the moment where a subtle, but definite change is taking place:
	You shift your weight
	and the bed sags
	  where you were
	there is someone in the next room

	You've grown shy
	  but no   my mistake
	your face in the half-light
	is remote.
Jill Dimaggio in IT'S NOT ALWAYS FAIR explores the effect of the discovery of cancer on her friendship with a man:
	...news
	such as this takes the
	whole of my heart and
	severs it in two
	one half anger
	the other half broken.
There are also some lighter hearted poems such as Johnny Hartner's EVOLUTION OF GRAFFITI and Scott C. Holstad's I TORMENT MY NEIGHBOURS (MAY THEY ROT IN HELL)

The poems are supported by black and white illustrations and there are four pages of small press reviews at the back.

reviewer: Ian Seed.