NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

Dreams & Nightmares #73 with its moonlit scarecrow adorning the cover is the 20th anniversary issue. This 24 page magazine of fantastic poetry, fantastic in the sense of being unreal or imaginary, has been published continuously since January 1986 which is no mean achievement. Editor David C Kopaska-Merkel looks forward to another twenty years of space aliens, dragons and things that go bump in the universe.

As indicated there's a wide range of spooky poems in Dreams & Nightmares.

Jessica Langer's contribution DIRGE had for me the best opening verse of the twenty or so poems in this edition:

	Rats run through the pools that gather
	in the curved cracks between cobblestones.
	There has been a rainstorm and their coats
	are soaked, cold drops holding each thin hair
	apart in drowned isolation.

Another talent is W. Gregory Stewart. His PROTOSOUL IN THE POST-CAMBRIAN EXPLOSION contains the following:

	but God does not pull the page
	from the carriage of the Celestial Smith-Corona
	and just toss it over His shoulder 
	when a scene doesn't work, giving up

	The train skidded to a stop one hundred yards away
	Carrying bits and pieces with it
	Ground to dogfood, ground to mush

	Jake wanted to scream and frighten it away.
	But it stared down at his dusty eyeballs and drew as close as a kiss

	daytime fireworks 
	his mother doesn't listen
	about the spaceship

Dreams & Nightmares believes in paying its poets; $10.00 and 2 copies on acceptance.

This is a double issue of DREAMS AND NIGHTMARES,

a magazine of fantastic poetry.

The magazine has been continuously published since January 1986. The poems are "accessible" in the meaning that they are readily understood and not of any esoteric nature. Some poems talk to us; others want us to witness an act of literary exploration, such as the poem SLEEPERS by Samantha Henderson with its part poetry, part prose style:

	James Telos			(pancreatic cancer)

at first he thought the Shonsar were still softly threading apart his brain, sending tendrils of thought and inquiry into his very mind as they did when they unsealed him. They stroked his psyche apart like the roots of a newly potted plant. They linked to him. They laid bare the history of his species and considered some more . . .

. . . an early attempt to use suspended animation to overcome the limitations of interstellar travel

Some of the poems give the impression that the poem has not been thought out yet and that the poet is feeling his or her way through the poem along with the reader. When Ray Greenblatt begins his poem IN THE LAND OF THE PHOSPHATES with the lines

	there is no water here.
	It is bottled in the refrigerator
	we treat as an altar

	We are here for the phosphates
	which will make us rich,
	then we will fly.

	We have blinded the sky
	we fell from,
	burned out
	the eyes of our brothers
	the stars in a long
	white shriek of ego terror.

Berrien C. Henderson's THANKS, ACME starts out naturally enough as a letter:

	Sirs,
	This winter my automated house caught
	Cold,

	My H.V. repaired itself.

	The objective world surrounding us
	is not the only one possible;
	there are others, latent.

	She married the wind on a Thursday

	A tourist asked the South African
	'Who built Table Mountain?'

	when the barefoot girls enter'

	Deep beneath the brine at the edge of the Great Salt Lake is a layer as telling
	as the stratum of charcoal the Iceni left underneath London
	or the trash heap under the ruins of Jericho:
	a dusting of very small
	gears, half metal, half crystal
	you'd think it was fossilized shells
	or the carapaces of tiny insects

	I've seen the dead returning
	kindred spirits in both worlds
	& others whose breath is upon me
	& smelled their drifting dusts.

The longest poem in the collection, Samantha Henderson's SLEEPERS transports the reader from one zone to another, slipping from dimension to dimension. The poem takes us to a place beyond recognition as a convoy of sixty ships conveys cryogenic coffins from "the Saturn sub-station," where:

	Within hours of launch seven seals failed,
	spewing out their contents in a red liquid mist.
	Fifty-three.

	No-one much spoke about where they'd gone
	The princesses, milkmaids, the wandering ones
	Who came upon, or conquered, or were sold into roses
	And hard, silent halls that had eyes in their stones.

	But in the end
	after the crying stops
	down in the grave
	and out of space
	the universal constant
	is something always there.
	And there's nothing wrong with it.

So dip in anywhere in this collection. Flip from back to front, turn it upside down, study the drawings and centrefold artwork. It's a compelling read.

There is a theory that the more urbanised and cocooned some citizens become (especially in America), the more they seek out risk and danger by other means. One of these outlets is via fantasy and horror writing. This is the be-all of this magazine. Those who already have enough dangers in their daily life can stop reading here.

A perfect example is BIGFOOT IN THE BARBERSHOP by Jamie Rosen, a clear observation of what we can go through at hairdressers':

	Air touches skin, virgin territory, newborn softness,
	and he sees something that, he realises, must be his reflection
	—sitting there, staring, his bare face a boldfaced lie

Now, back several centuries to Tom Galusha's TILL STARS TURN STRANGE, which gives a Viking-age Icelander's lament. This style of squashed alliteration is designed for easy recitation in the Great Hall. It is uneasy when put on any modern page. Here is an example from the first verse, showing the five or four syllabic line and the emphatic stress:

	Faithful Feathermane,
	first caught the scent,
	whiffed the wickedness,
	the wound-dew flowing.
	Mettlesome mare,
	mount of land-spirit,
	wheeling she went
	wild at the bane-stench.

At the other extreme, in the four page HOHOKAM ECLIPSE by Gary Every there is a good news-story buried,

	an ancient story written in black petroglyph stones
	scattered adobe ruins,
	and magical vulture bones.

	Today, the magic house of Morning Blue
	stands alone and unattended
	except for the occasional pudgy park ranger.

	as immaculate waiters deliver
	the decadence of the moment.
	Hedonists to a pin,
	we revel in our satisfactions,
	until the power unexpectedly
	fails in the thick of one more sensuous byte.

With the title L'WEK AND SARAH AT THE PANAMA-PACIFIC INTERNATIONAL EXPOSITION, 1915, here's what you expect in a horror mag, from Samantha Henderson — describing infants in their incubators

They look like worms. Raw pieces of meat. Wrapped up like chocolates ... The man walked right through her. She dissolved and re-amalgamated when he had passed. The woman in the chair laughed again at the fat man, her voice bubbling like melted silver.

L'wek tried to ignore her, but the subvocal scratch of her quiet weeping followed him to the Earthcrack, through the surface tunnels, down to the depths of the nethermost cave.

Dreams and Nightmares is a cheap and cheerful (perhaps not so cheerful in its contents) magazine "of fantastic poetry". At 20 pages for around £2 ($4) it's reasonably priced, though could maybe stand to be a little longer. For such a cheap magazine, it is quite attractively produced, with clean white pages, easily read font and a decent-looking blue card cover.

On to the contents: what I most enjoyed in this issue was undoubtedly the artwork. The first page sports a surreal black and white illustration featuring two profiled faces. One is sticking its tongue out, which promptly becomes a moustache upon meeting the face opposite. There are several other illustrations of this fantastical variety, including a larger one on the back cover.

The poetry left me a little colder, though. The first poem THOMAS THE RHYMER RETURNS TO ELFLAND by Darrell Schweitzer reads dangerously close to parody:

	This much is known and written
	and probably true, that when
	his days on Earth were done,
	there came before True Thomas,
	the prophet who could not lie,
	the poet who had seen
	more beauty than is in the world

	the part he never thought of
	was what were we to do
	if the Martians ever wrote us back,
	burning the earth
	with a long winded reply,
	chatting idly about the weather. 

	Outside:
	dark springtime

	flowers
	and stars

	Mysterious experiments in a cold room.