NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

This large anthology of work from the Royal Holloway Creative Writing programmes Inaugural M.A. group features the work of nine prose writers and six poets.

In a forward to the anthology, Andrew Motion writes, amongst other things, of the place and growth of creative writing courses in British universities. What is the best model? How should creative writing be combined with study and analysis? How is it to be assessed within academies? He expresses his pride at the

range of interests, stories and manners on show here... from the shocking to the familiar... the experimental to the traditional. ... (And) the technical dexterity and emotional commitment of the work, which represents a distinguished first-flowering for the Royal Holloway course.

I was particularly intrigued by the metamorphostic THEY SAID IT WAS BEAUTIFUL BUT JACK WASN'T SO SURE by Ben Gardiner. What begins as a languid tale of strange neighbours and furniture and everyday sexuality soon edges towards a shocking and surreal denouement. Like Jack we can only

stand back numbly and stare in horror!

The problem — there isn't a single, specific enough name to describe what it is, exactly — gets between them like sand in a machine, a grittiness that finds its way into every part of their life together

THE MALE GAZE, by Joe Treasure drops the reader running, into the vacuous futility of small-town U.S. university life where we are allowed to wallow in tired posturing, until ...

The contribution by the six poets is no less accomplished. J.T. Welsch offers ten poems, amongst which the universal focus of "OH," WAS THE SOUND OF THE WAITING ROOM demonstrates how the grip that ordinary events can ask universal questions.

Adele Ward has fourteen poems in this anthology. Her ADVICE TO WOMEN FROM A SPINSTER WITH DOG is a witty villanelle that was winner of the Radio 3 The Verb Villanelle Competition, though, for me, the poem SOLID WOOD evokes the world of the writer in a bed-sit wonderfully.

Harriet Thistlethwaite, on her dozen poems invites us into her staccato world of experimental lines, taxing the readers skills to extract and enjoy the underlying messages of her work. DUNWICH (in memory of W.G.Sebald) is typical of her incisive strength as a poet.

Doreen King is also represented here by twelve poems. She was a prize winner in the Kick Start Open Poetry Competition in 2005 with ON THE EDGE, possibly the most outstanding poem in this group, though the nineteen verses of SNOW DAYS is, for me, a great delight.

Adam O'Riordan demonstrates great skill in his eight poem group, the most notable is THE HANDS OF AN APOSTLE inspired by the well known Durer drawings, and the prose poem TRAIN tells a tale of great universality.

However the real revelation of this anthology is the seventeen poem offering by PAT BORTHWICK. This is the work of a highly accomplished poet. Already a well published writer with a whole raft of what Andrew Motion calls prize garlands With four pamphlets and two full length collections already published, several residencies and an International Hawthornden Fellowship (2003) one is led to wonder why she is pursuing an A.M.M.A.! Her poems take us on a journey beginning with PAGE 12 FROM THE HANDY LONDON GUIDE (MUSEUMS) where she seeks to find God in the Hunterian, to the sibling conspiracies of the wood-shed in, MURDER. We are invited into the sadness of the footprints left behind in SNOW as well as the delving inner-landscape of SCAN This is a poet who is not afraid to reveal her personal truths through the vicissitudes of her own journey, who is anxious to tell it as it is. She is a poet of great integrity as well as power.

As it says on the back of the tin

This compelling anthology showcases the writers from the inaugural year (of the Royal Holloway course): smartly original and refreshingly varied, here are some of the most exciting new voices in contemporary writing