NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW ON-LINE

At the beginning of this issue there are some interesting snippets from the news (extracts from newspapers, references to items on the radio) and an editorial with perceptive comments on small press magazines. Some lovely medieval faces are reprinted here in haunting black-and-white (of a Coventry mural fragment depicting the Day of Judgement) from a Benedictine monastery, brought to light by building work on an urban regeneration scheme.

There are an eclectic bunch of 27 poems from 17 poets, including Bill West, Michael Newman, Steve Sneyd, Alan Marshfield, Jerome Salzmann, Christopher Barnes, Neil Halliday, Geoff Sawers, Giovanni Malito and Jocelynne Precious.

Christopher Brewer in SIZE simply and aptly describes things from the field mouse's point of view:

       Bright-eyed and trembling, field mouse stares
       Between the towering stems of wheat,
       Eager and anxious, fraught with cares,
       Poised for peremptory retreat.

       Only an incoming aircraft
       breaks the greyness
       of the birdless sky.
 
       Outside my window,
       the sodden rosebush
       drips.

       late indiscretions under disco light
       answer the year's unspoken questions,
       tell tales guarded office days never would.

partakers in the gloom & doom.

       In memory I've pounded this road:
       Anyway, the bookies, the bars, the nic-nac shops,
       The Euro-discoes with their pungent, techno beat:
       In the port Tarragona,
       A tanker lists out to sea, like a dying whale,
       This was the town where Pontius Pilate was born:
       I have made poems out of flowers,
       Flowers with Latin names, but somehow
       There are no flowers here

       The future is shrinking.
       The past is growing.
       I look back on my words that lie
       On pages: all made up.
       What fiction we create!
       I don't even believe myself.
       If we were paid by lies we'd all live in wealth.
       I'm haunted by the growing past
       That looms over me.

       One day it shall occur to you
       That you are viewing the world
       In a new light,
       Seeing everything with new sight.
       Our minds are migrants
       Unable to settle in one place for long,
       Hunting truth in a shifting landscape;
       Nomads with no fixed point of view.

       We have courted outer space
       thinking to find ourselves,
       been remote enough
       to view a fragmented world,
 
       and always come back
       to pay the bill
       for what we can't reach.

       On a taut thread of wind

       Now forced into dull routine
       it flaps madly, uselessly,
       not having the wherewithal
       to exceed innate limitations
       even if dreams become prayers.

This is a cut-and-paste poetry zine of the old school — predating desktop-publishing and computer design.

Filching information from The Radio Times about Mars, the editor complains of them printing on a dark background — they do this to discourage folk from photocopying material!

The editor's scrawled remarks about the Hutton inquiry and other matters are scattered throughout, as are graphics by Bill West.

Gerald England's poem FUNERAL faces this one by the late Giovanni Malito:

	in the church

	the simplicity
	in unstained light
	slanting in
	from a high window
	glass clear
	as water
	is marred
	by the complex
	extrapolations
	streaming
	from the pulpit

This issue has 24 pages of poems and graphics reproduced direct from print-outs of contributors' MSS, added to TS items of the editor, reviews and other graphics. Perhaps the very lack of uniformity (changing typefaces, unexpected graphics and general positioning of content) is a gift to the enquiring mind-clock, ticking a bit faster as it finds what comes next and why. Sometimes these low budget protean creations can hide pop-ups of value sent in by poets unwilling to waste time and energy submitting to competitive quality journals. Poems by J.P.V.Stewart(MADEMOISELLE MUCHEMBLED) and Gordon Scapens (OUT OF STEP) may be of that category — the latter a philosopy on the futility of war and killing. Here is the ending:

	What will you say to children
	sharing a hand-me-down world 
	who are asking earnestly
	what the red stains say?
	Will you walk a clear conscience
	through fields that were witness
	and count the mounds of earth
	blanketed in silence?
 
	Carry victories with aching arms  
	but leave me with innocence.
	I've seen this march before
	and walk away, out of step.

A pleasant little magazine, its distinctly home-made appearance contrasts with the usual computer-produced magazines which nowadays look like printed books. This appearance helps give the magazine a reader-friendly look.

Editor Jocelynne Precious says this is a "pretty wintry selection" and though the poems are chilly there's no lack of power. Will Daut says:

		thistle and briar
	paint parcels of landscape,
		blend auburn and jade

	   The cicada knows
	nothing about the snowflakes's
	   chill geometry

	Zero-invisibility fog
	has replaced the fields

	Monstrous all colours
	traps of day of night each six
	months