NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

This is a stylishly-produced perfect-bound paperback anthology, featuring a total of thirty-four poems by ten poets. There is an attractive monochrome photo on the cover, and a second appears inside — both, it would seem, are by Sarah Kirwan. While there is no explanation included, the inference is that the poets are (or were) undergraduates at the University of Ottawa.

The standard of work on display in this anthology is uniformly high. Indeed, it is exceptional to see work by so many different contributors — each possessing a clear, matured, and distinctive voice — so enjoyably contrasting, and yet consistently professional in execution. The editors, who are not named, but who evidently spring from a writing group known as the 'Friday Circle', deserve huge credit for their exacting standards.

While all of these poets deserve a mention, the few poems that really stand out for me are those by Kelly Clarke and Lindsay Foran. Here is the sestet from Clarke's sonnet LITTLE SOUNDS, referring to a cat named Petra, though obliquely offering a realistic tale of loneliness:

	My hand slips from her head to her tail-tip, 
	and she's patchouli oil under my palm.
	She spills herself out, demands my worship, 
	serenades me through another sit-com, 
	then slips away to her hiding place 
	and washes me off her paws, tail and face.

	... a note to Daddy asking him to come home from 
	B.C. to be with me and here he is folks the best guitar player 
	ever never a no-show like George Jones was his favourite and 
	he's my favourite too even when he doesn't show even when 
	he does show and tells me to go to bed like a good little girl.

With a very different pace and tone, Foran's poems have an immediacy of perception that quickly sees into the depths of experience, then with instantaneous and surprising jolts merges those depths to ones cherished through reflection. Here is an example from UNCLE'S FUNERAL:

	The funeral parlour reeked 
	of stale flowers and freshly 
	vacuumed carpets 
	sucking away the scent of death 
	the stain of tears, 
	the heavy footprints of the living.
	Mom and I sat at the back, 
	casket closing, you standing alone, 
	mumbling the prayers 
	you forgot you remembered.

	I am in the corner of the painting, 
	a spec of pale pink.
	Some might see me, 
	but you won't, 
	and Mom can't, 
	an ocean blue 
	highlighting her face.
	She's painted beneath you — 
	under the grass.