NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW ON-LINE

This journal is issued three times a year and Roger Elkin has edited it for twelve years now. It is one our longest running poetry journals, with its beginnings in 1957. The format is A5, perfect bound with 128 pages of information and poems.

Every issue exudes a love of poetry. The size of the volumes themselves highlights the dedication with which they are produced. Issues of Envoi are well edited and they are substantial undertakings. Moreover, the poetry is consistently of a good standard. This volume contains a wide range of styles and topics and forty-nine poets are listed. In COLLARED DOVES Daphne Rance wills doves to her garden:

	Come then to my walled garden, bringing enchantment
	With every peer and preen of supple quill.
	Shadows of roses stain you and cloud colours swell
	The pearl and milk-smooth rounding of your breast.

	The powerful, clean Atlantic breakers
	thrash the long miles of burning sand with cool.
	Unexpected breezes fan our skins.
	We plunge in the salty water like animals
	freed from the tyranny of the merciless sun
	which strikes the villages behind us
	into silence, and stubborn, shuttered dark.

	Strangely
	it's the chaos I miss most,
	the three of us on the trampoline,
	colliding like atoms, explosions of slapstick,
	your mother at the kitchen window,
	shaking her head, toying with a smile
	while the dog whirled and leaped,
	barking to come aboard.

... indeed a recurrent comment made to me by such editors in a survey I made some years ago was that, though poetry sales rarely ever cover the cost of publication and publicity, having a good poetry list enhances the prestige of your house and is therefore good for business in indirect ways. But perhaps the sorry tale at OUP suggests such a policy might be elsewhere under review, too; and, such commercial houses might point out (and do), that they are not charity organisations.

Packed with poems, reviews, letters, competition results and in this particular issue tributes to the late David Bowes, poet and formerly ENVOI competitions administrator. Former ENVOI editor Anne Lewis-Smith quotes from David Bowes' ONWARD

	...Death is but a tenderness to life;
	extinction but an introduction
	to further exploration;

	...                                When his breath shut,
	when he began to cool — then, I called for family. It was

	almost a miracle, the Doctors said. Forty times the fatal dose
	and he nearly turned round. I felt myself on the wrong side

	of a door — a partition thin as plywood, thinner, as though
	you could hear everything that was going on inside.
	
	His mother hugged me. The brothers kissed me. Now we
	are your brothers. Have you ever been the wrong side

	of that door, knowing all you needed was the key and you
	could walk straight in? That's how it was. We were that close.

Sylvia Kantaris contributes a good article about drafting and re-drafting a poem about the death of a son of a friend, SOME UNTIDY SPOT which starts

	Tragedies happen anyhow, in corners, when other people 
	are working or just walking dully along...

	...and simply walked behind you on an ordinary path
	along an ordinary river's edge
	then wasn't on the path when you looked back.
	So all the lives he might have lived slipped out of him...

Some pedestrian pieces within this issue, eg Graham Buchan's THE WINE PRESS (complete poem)

	wish I could press your concentrate
	into my flask
	and go travelling off to Africa
	and sip you
	against the hot city walls.

Envoi is a magazine packed full of character and stands proud to be self funding. Being independent with no external financial support provides the editor, Roger Elkin, the freedom to produce it without interference from sponsors. In the Editorial section, Elkin points out that he has a

free hand to choose the contents of each issue on the sole criterion of the calibre of the writing.

consistently represents any one author by a group of poems ... to allow the reader to have a closer understanding of the poetic range of the contributor.

The poetry offered is wide ranging, various and good quality. Interestingly, in this issue, the women writers are predominantly represented together in the first half of the magazine and the men in the second half.

There is an approachable and comprehensive review section; in particular I enjoyed Rosemary Dresher on Matthew Caley's COLANDER MAN. Eddie Wainwright, a regular reviewer, has strong views on poetry and his essay on whether poetry matters is a great read. Taking his cue from Auden's, POETRY MAKES NOTHING HAPPEN, which he translates to — or POETRY DOES NOT MATTER — Wainwright offers a balanced exploration of poetry's value in society in a manner which is both straightforward and informative. No doubt this will create many levels of debate and response from readers for the next edition.

For writers of poetry the magazine is a good resource for competitions. Envoi's own competition is invaluable as it provides an overview of submissions and quite lengthy critiques of the winning poems (together with the opportunity for readers to offer their views).

Envoi provides a vibrant and approachable consideration of contemporary poetry and deserves a wide readership.

Scott, the founder, who ran this journal for 25 years until 1981, laid out a good foundation for the eclectic nature of acceptances, and a human approach to correspondence. His heart was in the right place, as he sponsored the manifold competitions and drew together supporters and well-wishers. Another similar span later under successive editors editors has proven the soundness of his approach, and its longevity is a tribute to his vision.

In most cases a welcome space is allotted for a selection of a poet's work or longish sequences, improving the reader's appreciation of the direction of skill and theme. A good example is the four poems of Michael Henry, the first (COTSWOLDS} nicely linking the communicative formation of script or font with botanical orientations. An intriguing conception:

	Further still, my journeyman's
	calligraphy of dense ivy
	and the fine points of bindweed
	in pica and long primer. 
 
	And for when we can no longer read
	the rough Braille of lichen.

	The children's mood spikes like temperature charts.
	I blow up a couple of balloons and tie them off.
	I get the children garbed and out-of-doors.
	Our red setter jumps into the brook
	and comes out gartered in mud. No one minds

	There are sweet smells in the garden.
	A herbal recovery room of lavender, thyme
	and rosemary. The lawn is hot and bruised.
	The pine tree is moulting,
	mass-producing tweezer-shaped needles.

	It must be hallucination, a wish of a bird
	that he sights, one hand signalling freeze,
	binoculars trained on nothing I can see.
	An acolyte's longing wakes in me
	and comes sharp suddenly as a blaze of blue —

Envoi is also a good mid-road journal to recommend to first-time or would-be poets, as I have so done from time to time. The current editor, Roger Elkin, seems to be doing a good job.