NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

This is a small poetry chapbook, with twenty-two pages of work, totalling seventeen poems in all, with two monochrome illustrations. (These, and the cover art, are credited to Wayne Hogan, and all show a surreal and imaginative temperament.) The author is described as widely published and 78 RPM is his fourteenth collection.

In some ways, the fact that this is the author's fourteenth such collection, together with its low-key, very unassuming presentation, struck me initially as off-putting. The combination made it seem as though this was likely to be filled with private rants and unchecked enthusiasms. In this impression I was very wrong.

Instead, what emerges is an attractive, personable voice, neither loud nor lacking in convictions. The poems have a conversational quality, with short lines and often epigrammatic ironic endings (which mode can become a little repetitive at times). They are the work of an intelligent mind and a feeling heart. There is no mistaking their acceptance of themselves as highly individual, even against the grain, as the opening poem, OLD RECORDS, makes clear. Here is the first segment:

	OLD RECORDS

	With their skips 
	and scratches 
	and hisses 
	and pops
	make me 
	feel good.

	and 
	when they're not barking,
	they're sitting there 
	waiting 
	for something 
	to bark at.  

	good dogs.

	and we danced to the Stones, 
	The Tractors and Willie Nelson and 
	Dion and The Belmonts 
	and finally walked out 
	into the drive-home night, 
	tired and happy, 
	smelling of beer and smoke, 
	glorious and content 
	in the 1 a.m. stars-out night, 
	in a parking lot 
	with wind in the trees 
	in Blandon, Pa.