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POETRY SALZBURG REVIEW is not an exclusive house journal of the Poetry Salzburg press. It aims to publish new poetry (including longer poems and translations), in-depth reviews and criticism as well as feature retrospectives and interviews. Wolfgang Goertschacher is overall editor supported by an editoral board of Lisa Fishman (USA), Klaus Martens (Germany), David Miller (UK) and Heidi Prüger (Austria), giving an international feel to this English language publication.

In a regular poets on themselves feature, Poetry Salzburg poet Estill Pollock writes about his own collection, CONSTRUCTING THE HUMAN, concluding

Within the process of self-examination, through which we become more conscious of our place within a physical space seething with phenomena, the experience of the poetry remains personal and revelatory

	Excitable atoms, busy bird shapes
	in slippersoft configurations
	whirl above your head.

Indulgence is either compulsive or disconcerting, so that to be judicious is difficult, but the conversative view of MacSweeney is that the excellent work is to be found in THE LAST BUD, BLACK TORCH, GLAD WOLF BATTLE GOSLING and PEARL, only; while his assimilation of feminism and popular culture points the way forward to English poetry. For a fan, the work is amazing.

Barry died in May 2000, a moment which altered British poetry spiritually, murderously, and irrevocably... Maybe he passed away from an excess of talent and excitement... I admit that Barry and I were in bitter feud at various moments, but we always ended up discharging our weapons in the air. I would like to express my gratitude, and admiration, to Barry's mother.

The poetry is largely descriptive, eg Susanna Roxman's gentle MIGRATING HOOPERS

	...Or ballerinas wading in rubber boots
	refuse to linger, won't languish,
	melt in anguish among tulle,
 
	then becoming ice floes on a lake
	unlocked, so palely blue
	you'd think it white. Icebergs
 
	are burning in the sky: a scent
	of water penetrates your spirit...

	...From shielding curtains, his close friends, helpless, watched him
	being marched off by the Franquistas,
	into the grey night.
	No flamenco,
	        no olés,
	                no sign of his white disk
	                in the cloudy sky.
	Just a rapid volley,
	            of bullets.

	After the Salzburg Poetry Conference
	In our chilly chalet room
	We warmed ourselves with Irish Cream
	And the splendor of his voice.

	A giant, haunted by the unsaid
	Stigma of his wife's death:
	I was surprised by his huge hand
	Shaking mine, like a bird in the nest.

More successful, and humorous, is James Brockway's tribute to Dutch poet Jean Pierre Rawie,

a present-day romantic who writes of hopeless, devouring love, and of death, but with the sobering insight of a realist,

	...O what can ail thee, sweet Rawie
	Poor haggard, melancholy one?
	The girl's gone home, the bar is closed,
	The party's done...

Containing poetry and reviews in almost equal measure, POETRY SALZBURG REVIEW is a heavyweight magazine with a mainly academic and international audience.

The reviews were scholarly, in-depth, and considered the publications within their social and historic as well as literary contexts; the reviews of poetry translated from or to German were especially informative and Claire Powell's review FOOD FOR THOUGHT: PETER FINCH AND THE ART OF WELSH COOKING was serendipitously placed after a selection of Finch's poetry, which made for an extremely fulfilling reading experience.

There was a quantity of strong and some startling poetry in this issue; Susan Maurer's DIADEM revealed a whole new world in a flannel:

	   This washcloth is the bathysphere of bathtubs,
	the cormorant of warm and soapy, bound round places,
	            a tiny landlocked sea.

	words come crashing
	through the blowhole of my brain —
	when the sea becomes
	the sea again — the sea.

With more than enough to satisfy most hungers and palates in this issue, POETRY SALZBURG is both a pleasurable and educational read.

Poetry Salzburg Review is a literary magazine containing new poetry, translations and prose from writers around the world: in this issue work is from writers from UK, USA, NZ, Australia, Austria, Greece, and others.

The volume contains a short introduction by the editor, Wolfgang Görtschacher, defining what has happened to the magazine since the publication of #2 six month's previously. He says,

A feature that has always been very important to me as a literary critic and translator is being introduced with this issue: the interview.

Görtschacher presents selections from forty-seven poets in Poetry Salzburg Review, demonstrating the range and versatility of these poet's achievements, from Marcia Arrieta's & WHAT DO WE UNDERSTAND, IN THE AWAKENING, to David Zieroth's THE FIELD. Translations are Hans Raimund (tr. Robert Dassanowsky), Hafiz (tr. Parvin Loloi and William Oxley), Angelus Silesius (tr. Anthony Mortimer) and Jorge Luis Borges (tr. Richard O’Connell).

Helpful for readers to whom translations may prove problematic are the biographical overviews of the poets, placing the person and his/her poems/translations into a larger context that often illuminates individual poems. In addition, a number of translators aided in preparing this volume, which eliminates the dangers of sameness that might arise if the same person attempted reforming foreign poetry into contemporary English.

The result is an interesting but necessarily uneven volume, presenting some poems that ring true to contemporary ears and others that are historically intriguing but lack the resonance they might once have had. Most are translated into loose free verse that sounds perhaps too familiar; at times, I felt myself wishing for an idiom that might suggest something exotic and unfamiliar while retaining an undercurrent of the universal.

Still, there is much to appreciate in the collection, from Hafiz's RUBA'IYAT, translated by Parvin Loloi and William Oxley:

		1

	When that black-moled beauty discards her dress
	She is a peerless moon of perfectness,
	With a breast translucent her heart is seen
	Like a hard stone in water, in its clearness.

	He labours at his desk in the Tuscan dusk
	On the first sonnet, the word as yet unspoke,
	Where scattered on the stained, disordered page
	Tercets and quatrains struggle through pen strokes.

	You begin to suffer rations gladly to suffer
	for those who are suffering worse,
	to each his own tea jar, sugar jar.

	Desert now.
	Your scope with no aim.
	Just walking
	And hearing the roar,
	The steps cracking shells,
	The rhythm of your breath,

Poetry Salzburg Review lends itself to quiet reading, even to study, especially for anyone interested in understanding the ideas and concerns of men and women from other nations, other times.

The editor admits in his introduction to being distracted from poetry-biz by the (then) looming war in Iraq. Quite right too. After reading what he has to say, I went looking for poems in the main body of the magazine that were suitably engaged with the way we live now. I didn't find many. The most engaged, most political, most dangerous piece is a translation of a poem about trench warfare (and sex) by Guillaume Apollinaire — written nearly ninety years ago.

At moments like this (with a new world order in the making) you wonder what the point of poetry might be. There have been times in the past when serious poets engaged seriously with current affairs — when poetry connected with the culture. Some of our big poets still do this (that could be why they're big) but most don't. Wandering about in any poetry magazine, I am struck by the airlessness — as in a sick modern office block in which the windows don't open. Görtschacher says that, of course, he has no intention of throwing his pages open to agit-prop. Maybe he should rethink that policy.

The Apollinaire is translated by James Kirkup (who should be eternally honoured for having once written the poem that Mary Whitehouse got banned). He also contributes some lively, grumbly, miserable old fart poems of his own. Otherwise what grabbed me most were the translations (by Rosemarie Waldrop) of some lovely, brightly coloured nonsense poems by the Swiss Dadaist, Hans Arp.

Poetry Salzburg is a conscientious, serious minded magazine. It publishes decent, mainstream poetry and stalwart academic articles and performs a valuable service by making foreign language poets like Apollinaire and Arp (and Stramm and Trakl and Lasker-Schuler and Guibert) available in translation. But — and this is the question that the editor himself is sort of asking — where's the danger? where's the trouble-causing? where's the fun?