NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

A small, well produced, perfect bound poetry book with 43 pages. Nicely edited by Rupert Loydell.

I do not usually go for dedications in a big way. Poets are not always at their best when faced with a loss and then writing soon afterwards. However, this is a perceptive and impressive book. Strangely, it holds together well considering there is a rather disparate selection of poets. In fact, the different styles give it added interest.

Some of the poems are a little obscure, and others are pellucid. There is an extremely interesting symmetrical poem by David H W Grubb, called LACRIMAE RERUM, and this is the first half:

	All the pages in all the books have become one word
	because this is the pity we read with, write with, wish
	to become.  And it is slow this gentle recognising,
	this seeing through one light and out to another,
	the loss of enchantment, as if in the centre of the song
	there is this secret that we do not even know we seek.

	Peter, you kept your eye on the window —
	drifting at midnight out where the moon
	was quitting the scratchy embrace of trees

	Switch off the lamp.  The night that fills the room
	is friendly, like those animals that talk
	in children's books.  The windows shift from black
	to starlight; wind; the unexpected calm

So then, this is a powerful poetry book dedicated to Peter Redgrove. Read it and see the glittering work produced by your favourite editors. Not easy going, a book to linger over with your midnight cocoa, as it takes you into the depths of expression and your own mortality.