NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

With the big commercial houses having shut up shop to all poets but the money spinners or the self-styled geniuses, and the smaller non-commercial poetry presses clogged up to the eyes with supplicants, what is to be done? Alan Baker, "editor, designer, promoter and distributor" — and indeed desk-top publisher and printer, and all else needfull — of Leafe Press has found a modest way round the problem: nine "chapbooks" in the four years of the press's existence, and if the quality of the writing generally matches that of the booklet under review, a cause for celebration and congratulation.

C.J. Allen — if you have not read him before, note the name, for you will again if there's any justice (which there isn't much, I agree) — has a track-record of prize-winning and being published in magazines of (I hate to say it but you know what I mean) some clout; unsurprising in view of the intelligence, wit and general entertainment value offered by his many-sided Muse — though what unifies the varied contents of this booklet is precision of observation and sharpness of language. Allen seems to refuse to allow the drab unsatisfactoriness of his world — largely a solitary world where he is a disenchanted observer rather than an eager participant — to bog him down in misery but escapes into flights of the funny surreal in which there is a tribe in Indonesia with a strange assortment of taboos and customs

	which forbid poisoning fish, using toothpaste, touching
	the breasts of virgins or having anything to do

	with the wheel.

	The skyline, hemmed-in
	by gathering clouds,
	is a palette of greys

	perfected to accompany
	the drab, thwarted optimism
	of an overwhelmed century...

	The usual battlefield topography, a wood,
	an incline, an uneven plain. A car parked
	by the roadside, a couple of people

	reading a map, pointing, then changing their minds..

	...A quick nod to Sidney in the pit
	who pulls up the band like an excited filly...

	Rain. Stair-rods. Sufficient
	rain to fill a wire basket.

	Sunlight is chiselling chips of flint
	from the river where, lost in contentment,
	a man stands up to the waist and wades
	in the water like the Jack of Spades.

			...the toothpick
	Gorm the Old used
	to winkle-out bits
	of fermenting herring
	from his unspeakable teeth..