NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

The series editor of these two thin illustrated booklets of poems, each of 8 pages, provides us with work thematically connected with their titles. When the slug-horn was first blown by Browning's dream-formed mystery hero, effectively a questing mind, the Victorian little knew of the various bandwaggons which later would be leaped on, SF or otherwise, some successfully by Stephen Smith, for example. James Herbert my favourite horror writer, in The Dark, makes it the tangible home of evil forces and lost souls. What's new then via the Dark Tower symbol?

Vol One (DARK TOWER DREAMS) contains 14 short to medium length poems. One jesting is DIVINE DESIGN PRODUCT RECALL by Eric Coates, where the spiritual equivalent of a Tesco research manager in heaven recalls Light Tower products having a use-by-date between 2020-2040 on Earth as they may be contaminated with darkness:

	Units affected are only those with Earth use—
	by dates between 2020 and 2040. They can be
	easily recognised — having a Kirlian image
	resembling a dark tower.

However, there are more believers in dark forces than cosmic jesters and perhaps we should pay attention to the poets who seem to have captured an essence of 'reality' in a darkness which is not mental illusion. Les Merton's THE DARK TOWER, and Phil Emery's PROPHECIES try hard to make us mere humans accept the unacceptable

Vol Two (CHILDE ROWLAND'S JOURNEY) is dominated by Steve Sneyd's CHILDE ROWLAND TO THE DARK TOWERS CAME for 90% of the volume, and I would have thought that it rather points to the ploy of simply publishing everything in one volume, although it is not easy to determine the state of mind of the series editor who decided that two were necessary. Sneyd, taking a leaf out of a Scots ballad told to Robert Jamieson, provides narration via a disembodied spirit of past doings, the entity being Rowland who remembered, as third son, football being played with the dried English head. I think it went over the Wall and his sister Helen was sent to retrieve it. The rest is the failure to find Helen again by the two elder sons Anir and Caradog who fail since they take no heed of druidic advice. There are many brilliancies in this Arthurian poem, e.g. after the quest ended:

	I have decided I do not ever
	want to use my own tongue again
	in whatever time I have left
	Nor will I thank you for your
	so-patient ear ... such gifts of listening
	that suck buried times to life
	are made to hurt,
	such giver's greatest secretest delight.

	And now for sleep, if how 
	that's done I have not also forgot.
	Or manage not to remember too well too soon
	how readily the Dark Tower is met again
	along the ways of nights like this.

	a sound
	of rats in walls that grew to sound of thunder being born,
	a shouting challenge, a huge monster as green as
	green, I mean greener than any green thing you can name —

This is the final part of the DARK TOWER SERIES, based loosely on Browning's poem — you know the one, Childe Roland goes it and puts his slug-horn to his lips.

David Leverton sits on THE BLACK THRONE:

	I wear depression's iron crown.
	It crushes me, it chills my bone,
	it pins me here upon the throne
	with orb and sceptre in my hands,
	unhappy lord of liveless lands.

	it is a whiskey miniature a fancy
	ornamental one in the ditch
	corpse seems to grin encouragement
	seems to say I don't need it anymore

	     Gazing down sadly
	   from the Gothic window
	of her tapestried chamber,