NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

Written on the inside of the front cover of this collection is a definition of the word poiema part of that definition reads as

something made, an artefact wrought by an artist.

	Old Thomas Tompion pondered a clock
	whose face should echo the escapement's rock
	and show with precise mechanical grace
	the earth's slant spin as it swings through space.

	To hear the peremptory knock,
	the unexpected visitor,
	the men arriving in the dark,
	the searching, bland inquisitor;
	to know assurance melt and end,
	the death of competence and calm:
	our fault we do not comprehend —
	it is out guilt that gives us form.

	An ordered office speaks an ordered mind;
	files docketed and indexed make it plain
	how projects are meticulously planned,
	smooth as scholastic logic, understand
	the basic premises, and the design

In TIGER, the big cat is not 'burning bright in the forests of the night' but is cruelly confined:

	The tiger's world is circumscribed
	by concrete bedded metal bars;
	the iron sky above his head
	is pierced by bolts instead of stars.

Mr Holliday is a poet who delights in form, and his villanelles are mesmeric (as they should be) and affecting. From POEM FOR BARBARA:

	The time is dead: it will rot come again.
	I couid not make amends now if I tried;
	It is not hard to bear another's pain.

	Obsessive fantasies torment the brain.
	Even Canute could not turn back the tide:
	the time is dead; it will not come again.