NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

In Cookson's Tyneside days my granny ran a thriving Gateshead bakery; home baked bread, cakes, and pies. But then she started diversifying and the business went downhill. It became just another shop. Soon she had to close.

It could be like that with this publication if the editor doesn't get a grip on things and back to specialising in what he knows best about and that is the Science Fiction & Fantasy genre. He must avoid at all costs the temptation to give, as he puts it, other poets and genres a spin.

Despite its title this 32 page magazine featuring 20 writers has nothing to do with trendy green issues apart from the fact that the editor Peter Presford ensconced romantically in Rose Cottage, Flintshire, North Wales, will toss your poem into the flames if he doesn't fancy it and you haven't enclosed an sae. At least he's honest about that. He calls it Poetry Incineration.

In his hurriedly written editorial Presford explains that he concentrates on what he terms items in the S.Fiction/Fantasy line, or, with an askew look at life or a subject. REPLICA by Ellena Van Tebberen of Aberdeen is an illustration of what he has in mind. Here's the 2nd and final verse:

	Scream!
	I need to scream!
	Never a person
	Always manufactured
	Those judgmental eyes
	Staring at me
	Never free
	A clone with a brain.
	Is what I am

	Hell has no objective existence except in your mind.
	Wish it away or regard it as play. If you'd been 
	truly objective, then you might have become Tsar of
	Outer Mongolia or some other trans-Siberian depot.
	Instead you invented the Arts Council!
						(screaming) 

For me SF & Fantasy poetry is enjoyable as an occasional aside. And when I turn to it I don't really want to find or expect to find other genres in there being given a spin, for it's a stand-alone genre; a specialist market in its own niche.

With able writers like Alessio Zanelli contributing in this issue THE MONSTER and Geoff Stevens with FROM THE INSTITUTE OF THEORETICAL ASTRONOMY there's evidently a source of suitable grist for the SF & Fantasy mill. The romantic holiday outings and other such stuff may be safely consigned to the kitchen stove at Rose Cottage.