NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

An independent small press poetry review

NHI independent review
THE REAL SURVIVORS ANTHOLOGY
edited by Barry Tebb
Sixties Press
89 Connaught Road
Sutton
Surrey
SM1 3PJ
UK
ISBN 0 9529994 6 3
£10
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This page last updated: 10th December 2007. 		THE REAL SURVIVORS ANTHOLOGY

Well — yet another anthology of poetry by people writing in therapy and then presenting their work to the public to help them understand and sympathise with their conditions? Not this one. This is presented as literature and it has literary merit, respecting the resonance of language and its eloquence. It gives a thoughtful and humane approach to the subject and is a worthy anthology of this type, containing a variety of works from talented poets. It does have some uneven items, but it is a substantial collection — and it might have been thinned a little.

Barry Tebb is an experienced editor. It is always a problem to get these types of anthology right, and this one is not bad at all. The work is well-edited, well-presented, and there are some surprisingly good pieces here. The extract below is from A DREAM OF A MEETING by Kevin Crossley-Holland:

		I strain
	my eyes to see her features
	as a sculptor searches stone,
	finding there correlatives
	of his own huge passion.
	Her face is a lily spathe
	with no blemish, and her hair,
	moon-pale, falls out behind her.
	Green-sheathed she grows now, grows
	towards me.
and here is Mario Petrucci's MR HAYNES:
	and all his precious laws on the brink
	in the way that middle button of his labcoat
	had been left undone as he nearly almost not quite

	breathed some great word into that
	distilled void his shaking had made and
	the purity of the empty blackboard remained
which is expertly handled and gives something of the horrors of confronting illness and possible death close to home. And Michael Haslam gives a sequence called SPRINGGAN FAIR, which goes like this (part 4):
	We're in the book, a double bill
	to top at The Pavilion.  When
	the rubber men have scratched, outstretched,
	squealed off to pop,
	and all the mummers' props despatched,
	     we're on.
We are reminded of the unnerving nature of our fragility at various points in our lives, and Jon Silkin touches on some of the effects that tragic personal experiences bring in THE RETURN:
	     I have carried for five years
	In me, your country cupped with oval leaves.
	     It is a land quickened with streams
	Which I have no confluence, yet they now firmly flow
	     One liquid star in my blood;
	It is as a jewel there.  It is fearful and
Barry Tebb gives a sequence, called THE ROAD TO HAWORTH MOOR, and I leave you with an extract from section 5; and I suppose we all reminisce about those times before we mess up in life, at least I do:
	If only we could go back to the cottage on the hill at Honley
	Where the road sweeps gently under the bridge
	          where trains never ran
	Our voices still echoing round the cavernous walls
	          the smooth moss clings to
	And we are beyond the reach of the driving rain.

reviewer: Doreen King.