NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW ON-LINE

Packed into this 4-page newspaper style supplement, part funded by the Illinois Arts Council, are 48 contemporary, quality poems on a wide variety of themes. Most contributors are American but the British poet Helen Buckingham is represented by three poems and other international contributors include Giovanni Malito, a chemistry lecturer in Cork and the Australian poet John Grey.

I like BETWEEN by Ron Offen for its language and images:

	In the cold cellar of December,
	where we store the apples of summer
	and the last of autumn's leavings,
	the sun is like a memory of smoke...

	Privy to non-sense already, I'm ready
	when a willow-twist of wind lifts me onto the porch
	of a shotgun house and blows both doors ajar
	so I can see the abandoned outhouse back
	by the chinaberry tree.

	A horn sounds,
	the sparrows break away,
	the hawk glides into blue to fill his belly,
	and cars and trucks move beyond the light,
	their drivers headed home
	to plates of warm chicken.

	The trick is to keep the syringe hidden.
	If you flash it, like a dagger, in front of the cameras,
	The children will disbelieve spin-doctors
	Who talk of fairytale democracy. What's worse
	The little bastards won't sleep and the dose
	Will have to be endlessly increased.

RIVER KING, printed like a newspaper, with its contents laid out in columns, seems a splendid way in which to present poetry. I was first introduced to this type of publication in 1998 when I was sent a copy of The Endless Mountain Review (Pennsylvania) - also good.

I was encouraged by the very first poem on the front page — DIRE-POOR-COP, by Coral Hull. Scathing and funny — yes it's the rich what gets the pleasure of slumming it

	I wish I could slum it like the middle class hippies.
	In the big rebellion from rich mummies & daddies.
	But I'm from the working classes, worn
	down in my twenties, it took me twenty years
	to get rid of my base Christianity, my homophobia,

	Hunger is green
	if the hand reaches to feed it.
	Hunger drains to white
	when it sings its siren song.

	I want this poem
	to be an edible green prayer
	we share
	at a table for two.

	My father paid for his life
	in thirty two instalments.
	First incisors, then canines,
	and finally molars crumbled
	like the Roman empire, leaving
	splintered runs in his mouth.
		He eats
	to fill the cavity in his chest
	where his breath no longer can reach
		but sometimes
	I have to spin him around
	so the light won't wrap
	itself around his back
	and cast a shadow.

Poetry for me, is the most essential kind of communication there is. There will always be a need for poetry and for poets — for at our best, we speak to and for the human condition, not just the collective head and/or heart, but to what it means to be human with all our frailties and our dreams.

YES!

RIVER KING POETRY SUPPLEMENT is a broadsheet formatted U.S. poetry periodical edited by Wayne Lanter. In this issue the good poems are those by the non-British and Irish contributors. With the British and Irish contributions we see as usual the ongoing fetish with description, a prosaic register and the obsessive desire to introduce into poetry the techniques and tone of prose-fiction. True poetry attempts to provide a lexis which allows for a multiplicity of meanings. The function of prose fiction is the converse of this in that it attempts to limit multiplicity of meaning, so as to better serve the requirements of plot and character development. I will look firstly at the British and Irish poets. In GRAVITY GETS YOU IN THE END by Maureen Gallagher we see a lamenting of the aging process:

	Gravity gets you in the end;
	once you start the slide
	there's no stopping the momentum

	I watch you and think,
	twenty years from now
	you will be me, or could be me.

In DISINFORMATION by R. G. Bishop we see another lament, this time tinged with indignation, at the explanation the church gives —"he has placed his soul into the hands of God"— for the death of a man:

	Not true! What famous crap God's image
	blathers; he was knocked down
	first by a stroke,
	then left like a lung fish in the spittle of old age

FINTAN WRIGHT by Noel Conneely is merely about an amateur mechanic who likes to tinker with his Morris Minor:

	Though the garage was a greasy place,
	he seldom dressed in overalls:
	and when he did,
	they were the next best thing to clean.

	No better man to listen to
	an engine's anxious bleat
	and before you could say sixpence
	to diagnose the matter

When we come to look at the contributions from the non-British and Irish poet in this periodical we see a marked difference in approach. The emphasis is not as much on the "real" or empirical but rather on the imaginative as in SPACE by Holly Feldman Karapetkova:

	What we still do not know, and what fascinates me,
	is what the light passes through
	as it moves for decades toward our eyes,
	what happens in the distance between the
				vision and the future

	In the end solitude would win
	The farther you seek
	the little you find.
	For the journey must begin
	with a will to swim
	towards that light within

	I thought the past could be pursued
	from the point where it shed you
	in the wasp swarm of incidents midway between worlds
	I was wrong
	— I will not join that wasp swarm —
	you were right to be wary
	so many unknown faces during the breaks
	a slammed door
	and the news I still hope for

This issue consists almost entirely of poems but with a column AL SAYS and an in-depth interview with poet David Ray by J. F. Garmon. In the column AL SAYS, the author states his reason for the choice of poems in this issue:

Assuming that art does influence and aid in the creation of a culture, as it is obvious the oppressor assume, Al is pleased to open the pages of River King to these, and other, 'hard thinking' poets.

	They are hard at work on a monument
	while the smoke is still roiling out of the pit,
 
	raising the question of how much effort
	it takes to pound the present into the past
 
	and quickly convert a disaster still in progress
	to the status of an ancient and archaic attraction.

vulnerability that drives the poet to engage in dialogue with the world even if the world doesn't respond.

	The friendly face — no
	challenge at all. But you — now
	there's stone worth the work!
 
	e-mail, such closeness —
	but its silence — rejections
	even on Sunday.

	since the wheelchair came
	I've not wept
	I'll cry when it goes.

	. . . his mother
	prays to the virgin
	but decides to pray
	to the mirror

	And then to awake, and like a wanderer, white
	with bedroom flesh, to arise, cock-crowing
	at tile shining, it was like Adam and the Maiden,
	a new day dawning

Let's take a look at some of the other poets in this large issue: Earl Coleman, Steve Taylor, Richard Arnold, Helen Buckingham, Amanda Doering, Willie James King, to name a few. There's a lovely line of writing that runs through River King from political poems through ecological poems to personal poems. It's hard to pick out favourites or typically modern poems from this mix, but how about this, from Ian Seed's poem TOAD:

	This week on TV I saw children
	from the poorest quarter of Warsaw
	who cut the front legs off a toad
	and danced around him: victims
	making new victims.

	We're tipsy May-flies on their
	single-day carouse while Stonehenge,
	marking every second of the night and day
	still weights the earth and stays.

This publication from Illinois is 12 page newspaper format which aims to supply those interested in contemporary poetry. Glancing through it, there is variety but I would like to see an even fuller range of contemporary work on balance. For instance, I particularly like contemporary haiku, sijo, haibun, visual and linguistical offerings and non were present. However, there was a nice selection and maybe other editions will carry such forms.

The standard is high. It seems that unlike most poetry journals and magazines, it does accept previously published work. It offers quite an exciting mixture and it succeeds in having a contemporary feel. This is from Dave Etter's NEWLYWEDS:

	Oh my
	we were
	young then
	and in-
	nocent
	and new-
	ly wed

	You waltzed through the park's
	long grass, feet flashing and diving

	like fish in and out of the shadow
	waves beneath the trees, your blue dress,