NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

This is a brave poetry book, a bit like an octopus, with imagination stretching out tentacles in all directions. Films, politics, planes and Essex are just a few of the topics. It is Andrew Duncan's eighth collection and it is brimming with echoes of poets, people and experience. There is even a poem called BOB COB BING BONG, inspired by the work of Bob Cobbing. A large sequence, called WEAPONS FORM WITH MUSIC, relates to THE WATER MARGIN, a 13th century Chinese novel, and section 3 is reproduced in full:

	Wet petals clinging to a pomegranate.

	Sung Chiang applies
	a tab of LSD under each eyelid
	left and right
	and sticks a martial arts video on —
	Five elements Ninja.
	Indeed, we are not in the city
	said the Daylight Rat.

	Gleams in the glass of furnace slag
	eloquence inked in the rich soot of clinker
	topsoil seared with a torpid blade
	of toxic metals
	lash of chimney plumes laden with particles
	black rains
	dropping their high-temperature loads with a sigh.