NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

RUNNING THREADS contains the work of four poets from Scotland : Jim Hughes, Rowena M. Love, Michael Malone and Sheila Templeton. This quartet appear together in performance and their perfectly bound volume provides a useful introduction to their poetic styles.

With 91 poems, a page of acknowledgements and 4 pages devoted to biographical information the book appears to be good value for money. However, many readers may find the layout and style of this collection disappointing. All the poems are indexed by title, but not by author. Because the poems are not collected by poet, but appear as a mix of the four poet's work, it is impossible to use the index to identify the work of individual poets. Consequently, to follow the work of any of the poets, one is required to laboriously track their work page by page through the collection. The book also contains some strange editorial compromises: certain poems are reduced to a tiny font to fit the poem to a page, yet others are allowed the luxury of retaining font size whilst stretching across several pages. — This irregularity is poor design, smacks of unnecessary penny pinching and spoils the overall appearance of the text.

As an Englishman, I found the dialect poems difficult. It is tedious to have to rely on footnotes to make sense of a poem and I was frustrated not to be able to hear the poem from the page as I stumbled slowly over pronunciation. Obviously these poems work best in performance as do a number of those written in English like Michael Malone's lengthy A DAUGHTER'S DIARY.

I had not come across Sheila Templeton's work before reading this collection. Hers is a poetry of everyday and memories, told in an conversational style as in BREAST SCREENING:

	She picks up my  right breast
	in one hand, weighing, slapping it
	across a cold metal shelf, smoothing,
	flattening, like a lump of dough.

	His bonnet covers bumpy bits
	and narrow strands of hair. I lean
	against his smell, freshly dusted
	sawdust mixed through
	Capstan Navy Full Strength.

	We did the shopping first.
	In Laiguelia market, the morning stretched
	lazy arms. We stroked glossy purple aubergines,
	held powdery-lilac swollen heads of garlic,
	weighed single tomatoes. Each one
	would have made a workman's lunch.

	Above the school, a smudge of starlings
	bank and swoop, practising curved paint strokes
	against grey November sky.

	In the shallows, you stand
	exquisitely balanced
	on your dark reflection.
 
	The power of great wings
	mirrored in the strength
	of your stillness.

	To think the legs that prop me
	used to pump around fields of cropped grass
	rarely moved below a canter
	looked quite good in shorts
	would not now look out of place
	behind some chicken wire.

	The dressing up box has been raided:
	a smudged-lipstick robin primps on the fence;
	chaffinches parade in fancy costumes;
	a single crow clatters along the roof tiles
	in Mummy's high heels.