NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

This is the first issue of Envoi under new editorship, that of Jan Fortune-Wood, after Roger Elkin's many years of sterling work. One innovation is that, though still promising to publish at times little groups of poems to represent a poet's work, Envoi will now also publish single poems, which does imbue the magazine with greater variety and approachability; the old method was a bit unremittingly leaden, to be honest.

We are presented with an interesting, if generally fairly safe bunch of poems. A lot of them (by, for example, Jacqueline Saphra, Gol McAdam, Ian C. Smith, Tom Duddy, Mavis Gulliver and Martin Cook) are centred around memories and their emotional duality, their sadness amidst the joy of recapturing something lost, some of them naturally tying in with the theme of death. BREAKING DORMANCY by Mavis Gulliver explores tenderly, and movingly, the ache that the death of a loved one brings:

	Three years on, the ache of your death
	has dulled...a little.
	I have learned to speak of you without weeping.

	Confused, an ageing man
	Remembering no one dream
	Knows that the flash and flake

	Are gappier than they seem.
	He forgets age and friends,
	Gropes forward as he can.
	The blank signs post no ends.

	The pulp of your problems is spread
	and picked at, picked at, picked at,
	until you add up into a flawless sum,
	the equation of why you're so fucked up is complete.

	You answer. Your
	Eyes drift off shore.
	'She's gone.' You say,
	and so begins
	the meaningless torrents
	of regret.

The issue's Guest Poet is Herbert Williams, with four beautifully-crafted poems, whose simplicity and clarity of style, vision and imagery achieves a complexity of meanings and empathetic associations, unlike, to be honest, many of the other poems which seem to do it the other way round, achieving an overwritten, albeit well-meaning, mundaneness. But then, I suppose, Herbert Williams is a master. Here is a sample from DREAMS:

	Sometimes I dream
	of people long gone
	they rise from their sleep
	and tell me things
	I do not wish to know

	Do I enter their dream
	or do they enter mine?

	Her hair it was
	flying away from her face
	like something startled.

	He remembered 
	hair just like this
	he had touched.

	Two children
	kissing.

This issue of Envoi celebrates its fiftieth birthday with a stunning cover design and a selection of fine poetry. The choice of work is varied in style and content. Although the magazine is now produced in Wales, the poets featured come from all over the U.K. and beyond.

The production values are high. Despite the large number of poems included there is no feeling they have been crammed in. This was a fault of the old, but otherwise excellent, Envoi.

The editors have maintained the 'old' Envoi's policy of giving each poet an ample showing — not less than two poems each. Mario Petrucci is this issue's 'guest poet'. His six poems are, as one expects from this writer, highly innovative but not abstruse (well hardly ever). It would be difficult for me to quote his poetry without quoting the complete poem: the stanzas merging, as they do, until the poem's resolution/ revelation in the final stanza.

There are many known names featured in this issue: K.V.Skene, Brendan McMahon, Nigel McLaughlin, Tim Love, etc. Here is a sample from K.V. Skene's sequence of subtle poems mapping a spinster's quietly tragic life — GRACE UNDER PRESSURE (the third poem in a six poem sequence):

	she crosses her moonscape
	dry-eyed, terrified

	to weep for what she must face
	in the morning

	sleepless
	she dresses for work with frost-bitten fingers

	...

	almost dizzy with the fear of forgetting
	everything

	leaves her breakfast cup on the kitchen table
	the tea growing cold

	There's something about lichen on stone;
	unexpected light of sun
	on a spider's thread
	stretched between slabs in November,
	life clinging to the surface
	and warmed for an hour
	before occlusion,
	clouds blanketing the sky.

This is a splendid magazine, up there with the best, may it last another fifty years.