NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW ON-LINE

Tony Frazer's SHEARSMAN allocates a generous few pages to the work of each of a good number of poets. The magazine's house style is trim and organized, but also pleasingly unpretentious, allowing the reader to concentrate on the span of each writer's contribution.

This issue opens with Richard Burns' extraordinary THE DEAD DO NOT HEAR US, a five page piece de resistance about the nature of death. Do not be put off: there is no hollow melancholy, cliché or pretension, rather a succession of brilliantly-depicted scenarios that encapsulate how the awesome diversity of human life is sucked towards the same inevitable conclusion. Burns reminds us of the atrocious:

	The virgin of Lorraine or Toledo, the Jew from Vienna or Wroclaw,
	The schoolboy from Kragujevac, the noble Ethiopian,
	The farmer outside Srebrenica, the librarian from Pristina.

				. piggy who stayed at home
	To look after Mother or Grandad, dig the allotment,
	Clean well and stairway.

				To hear and understand
	Whatever the dead may be saying, whatever it is they want.
	Between these gull-haunted, rock-dotted, island-strewn.
	Archipelagos they have already sailed, endlessly.

	Water, you are unwell
	a stone falls through
	your battered embrace

	like the heaviest
	weather or a comet plummeting
	through space.

	A bag of small sharp knives is emptied on my head.

	trunk lofted, jostled
	on razored legs, stockings

	peeled in the heat
	moss    sunbeam    bone

	It's a vile house the tiled house
	and ready to tumble down

	Under all this smoke
	there smoulders a little spark of truth..

SHEARSMAN magazine is published quarterly and is also available at its website. The booklet contains poems by seven poets and prose by Dennis Barone. This collection gives the sense of unpretentious writers, very often writing from the heart, with a quick eye for cant, hypocrisy, injustice, and the ludicrous.

There's variety in the poetry, though overall the hallmarks are a simple, straightforward, accessible poetry that at times seems to veer towards prose. Each poet, bar one, has three or more pages at their disposal and makes good use of them.

The poems range in scale from Karin Lessing's YUNNAN SKETCHES that take up seven pages, plus three pages of notes, to Sam Sampson's NOWHERWHON, Andrew Jordan's NO RESISTANCE and WORKING, Catherine Hales' OPEN ROAD and THE THEATRE BOX, Carrie Etter's sequence DIVINING FOR STARTERS, Fred Johnston's A ROOTING GIFT to Aaron McCollough's EKLOG SOUTH. This is an ample selection of verse by British, American and a New Zealand poet.

The range of poetry on offer work that is brilliantly descriptive and lyrical, as in Lessing's YUNNAN SKETCHES, mysterious as in Sampson's ENCOMPASSED, satirical as in Jordan's NO RESISTANCE, and prose-like as in Etter's DIVINING sequence. In some of these poems we note the accuracy of description, as in Lessing's TIGER LEAPING GORGE

	Sheer rock faces closing in, inch-wide the sky

	now it all fits together neatly
	this syntax

	thus we look into the face of god
	floating cupboard of each face
	let us in   come in
	let us in, we'll rest
	come in, we'll travel together

Darkness and damp have cut the city's population into half its high season size and, for a moment, gauzy snow covers the barren patches of a near-empty park

These diverse poets appear to be mature in their strengths and interests. The latter includes travel, prison, culture, theatre, stone, and much else. One result of the variety of poetry is that here is a book that gives an impression of people, of past and of present that one can actually recognise.

I was disappointed by this. The writing is highly competent, but I found much of it to be oh-so-po-faced-serious, and — dare I say it — dull. I've no doubt the work means a lot to the poets concerned and to the editor, but I found it largely cold and unapproachable.

For lightness of touch, lyricism and a little humour I had to turn to Robert Saxton, whose THE GOATHERD, from LOST MANUSCRIPTS OF DUBLIN, I found particularly good:

	Across the Halfpenny Bridge he piped his goat.
	The gypsy princess on her barge of state,
	where Egypt's wobbliest sailors navigate

	the wildest waves, noted nothing of any note —
	only the drunked reel of a flashlight
	high above her prospecting the velvet night

	for jewels

General remarks are that the poetry in the issue is fluid, economic, has quality and performs well in description of events to a reader outside the orbit of the poet's own experiences. Sometimes poems demand a setting within which the reader can enter and be part of the scene but none here fit, seemingly a defect in trends which are objective and practical in the everyday world instead of tranposition to another reality, as if poets have lost the ability to go beyond physical reactions and get out of their mortal shell, so to speak.

Nevertheless, CORFU WITH AN UMBRELLA by Brian Louis Pearce is one of the best for purity of description, observation and imagery. He, having poked Corfu with his umbrella:

	till it is green and cicerone,
	white above pools of marine
	green, olive above white rocks.

	Waves, red sail, boy fishing;
	girl watching, hair brushed back
	by the beach breeze, gusting

	after the poet's cap . . .

	There was an old man of Corfu
	Who never knew what he should do ...&c

	I will never get back to heaven-road now; wander
	this keck-end of world
	lonely for brightness

	sedge, willow and alder, a pair of kingfishers,
	blue jewels, quick,
	sedge, willow and alder, a pair of blue jewels
	like kingfishers your eyes