NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

Negative nostalgia abounds as Calway place-jumps for reminiscences, and there are enough of them in this 150-page collection of poems (many redredged no doubt refreshingly from earlier poetic fathoms containing previous work selected for publication).In WELSH RUGBY, presumed at the time he was in a junior school in Wales, where he was born, Calway takes positive pleasure when Ma Kinnock sees him break another boy's nose in a game of rugby:

	The game she saw me break Pike's nose was the proudest day of my life —

	It's difficult for the English to understand this. 
		It's why Rugby isn't cricket in Wales
			but War.

	And the unwashed plates, the serving knife,
	Littering last night's supper table,
	Hold a nostalgia, cold but not keen, in the dining room

	For if he ever was here seems oddly irrelevant
	Knowing now he has gone
	And left no address.

Some work will have been enhanced. perhaps, in emotional ephemeral live performance, which sit without comparable attraction on the printed page where there is more time to analyse them. One poem which needs no such boost is SEDGEFORD OCTOBER, previously used in The Rialto:

	Somewhere mellow between
		the end of the overblown blackberries
			and
		the start of the harvested leaves
	fused flies
		on clinical sills
			hint at bleached sun

EXILE IN HIS OWN COUNTRY is a bit cobbled from previous work and not perhaps an effective synthesis. Nevertheless the skills and powers of poet Calway present this as a variegated tome well worth obtaining.