NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW ON-LINE

This quarterly is in its eleventh year — not bad for a small publication supportive of local interest and wider interest in poetry. It relies on subscriptions. As usual, this edition contains reviews, information, and pages of poetry. Also, as is generally the case with such magazines, there is variability, but this in turn offers the variety and encouragement that poets need. In doing so it achieves the intimacy of a circle of writers helping each other, yet is able to be receptive to a range of approaches.

This issue contains poems about relationships and the consequences of relationships:

	The sea, silently
	Edges away from the shore.
	More pebbles are revealed
	Slimier as they move away
	Towards the boats
	Until even they are stranded.

	Towards the west
	The Sun also retreats
	Leaving only you
	On the wide beach.

	On the patches of sand
	Ruined castles stand.

	Through the tangled canopies of twig and branch
	as bare trees jostle
	through the mist stretch faded horizons.
	Sweep of road, then pale yellow and brown land,
	is caught up in the gentle haze.

PULSAR POETRY MAGAZINE is published quarterly by the Ligden Poetry Society. The society was formed by Ligden Publishers with the express aim of encouraging the writing of poetry and with a view to publication in PULSAR POETRY MAGAZINE. The booklet is nicely presented, one or two poems to a page, cover illustration by Sally Turner. The magazine opens with Live Poetry Reviews, and is followed by a section of reviews.

The first section of poems are the Pulsar Poetry Competition Winner, Second Prize, Third Prize and two Recommended Poems.

Throughout the dominant themes and concerns of this group of poems, with their evocative sense of place, is a recurrent mood of hope and optimism. Chris Hardy's winning poem MEGALOPOLIS places the persona in "The great city," within a broader context of others being there also, but with a personal ambivalence towards the invisible city itself. The poem explores a sense of "perturbation" with the city itself and "its people working out their time." Steve Allen's second prize poem GOTH CITY examines the world of Goths from the perspective of "outsiders":

	Shop assistants!
	Is that the way to describe
	space-age, plastic-garbed females,
	wafting between luminous hangers,
	beneath such hair, such black eye make-up?

	But my aim, being a girlie, was never that good,
	so maybe I should just forget you.

	One learns that NCO markers award A grades
	To those who recite pamphlets ad-verbatim,
	And instructor-pilots grade those exceptional
	Who copy them without any deviation.

	Shall I trot
	Out my humble dream, like some half-starved mutt
	For your derisive pleasure?

	I made a pretence of sorting through your mail
	fingered the disconnected black phone
	then hurried away from your absence
	into the dark night — alone

	There I was, in the empty forecourt of the Esso garage,
	sniffing the petrol pumps,
	elusive.