NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

This is a strong and varied collection, the title taken from the first poem, WILLIAM BARNES WALKS HIS PARISH.

Like the dialect poet, Barnes, Andrew Hawthorne meditates on the bones of our ancestors, from the discovery of an ancient skeleton during the construction of the Dorchester By-Pass, to the fate of Uzzi, the Bronze Age mummified man. He also deals with political and social themes in poems like HOLOCAUST and FOR KEN SARO-WIRA, both resonant with anger, while the later sections include several fine elegiac and personal poems, like FIFTY YEARS ON AND STILL WAITING, MY SON, MY SON, and ELEGY.

For me, these are the most memorable in the collection, emotion being tightly controlled within a skillfully handled and flexible free verse as in ELEGY

	You asked me to return to your photograph albums 
	and trace your gentle smile across the century

Andrew Hawthorne, like the ancient bards, is a focused poet; his themes are sometimes momentous, and the stories they run through are narrated with a freshness, an immediacy that is often riveting. His sets of poems explore such happenings as the fall of a castle to the Romans, the frantic efforts of the Carpathia to aid the doomed Titanic, and the last hours of Christ on the Cross. Diverse in their locations and characters they are, nevertheless, linked by endings that are also beginnings — the metamorphoses to which all things, tangible or otherwise are subject — from the final stanza of THE AFTERMATH OF CARPATHIA:

	And in the brief North light that winter,
	white the setting sun flamed against her broken hull,
	her steel was plundered.
	Sawn, smelted, manipulated, piecemeal
	and recast in order to be strewn in splinters
	across the Somme...

	The waitress yawns toward him, takes his order,
	slides back behind her counter, rattles cups and saucers,
	looks nowhere. Her machine
	coughs and hisses, froths scalding milk

	The businessmen, briefcases rested and ajar,
	talk of e-commerce and company cars
	and sex. One in mirror-shades,
	perspiring, a red tie, reaches for the sugar...

	In air-conditioned cars the people pass.
	Their spirits become
	disassociated, rise, get left behind
	and walk along the middle of the road,
	seek each other in the dark

	and opposite,
	at the spot the cyclist died —
	(RTA and DOA)
	father of twins —
	the flowers at the roadside shrine
	wither and fade.

	we become our shadows

	our voices are only whispers in the wind-blown grass,