NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

This poetry miscellany is published by Free Lunch Arts Alliance of Illinois, and is subscription free to all serious poets living in the U.S.A. The work of 25 serious poets is included, and contains details of many of their most recent publications..

Notable contributions, always difficult to pin down and obviously subjective, come from Jack Ridl whose poem GROWING UP IN A SMALL TOWN offers a warm portrait of what must be a great common denominator in small town America, where:

	the coffee's hot and stronger by the hour.
	If it's winter, the walks are shovelled,
	all but one. By noon someone will notice
	and clear the way, knock on the front door.

	And now there's only a gas station,
	...
	At the pump, a dog limps away, nipples
	Dragging on the gravel while five teenage boys
	Prop themselves up against the ice machine,
			... Here
	I am some girl,
	Spreading her map on the hood of a truck,
			... just some girl
	Who can drive in so fast, drive out so much faster.

	As I was young uneasy among the emerald fields
	I wrote them hard and unforgiving

	When I tell my mother I need a job she says just don't
	Write obituaries because you will think a lot about death
			people are tired of
	Reading about death and worms so nobody will publish your 
	Poems, you will never become famous, forget immortal, you
	Will be stuck writing obituaries forever, trapped in this
	Never-ending cycle 
	...
	you will grow even sadder, won't smile anymore and
	Nobody will see what straight teeth you have.

	Locked on the hill, embraced
	by the roots of a young maple
	it remembers the turbulence
	of earth before the imprint
	of glaciers and hooves,
	before generations of grasses,
	the brush of butterfly wings,
	...
	... watches the moon project
	A cold view of the future

FREE LUNCH is published by Free Lunch Arts Alliance, an Illinois non-profit corporation and is edited by Ron Offen. The magazine contains poems by 29 poets, two or three represented by more than one poem. Cover art is by Kenneth Koskela.

There is an unfussy elegance and clarity and a clear sense of design to the layout of FREE LUNCH that is genuinely responsive to the texts it contains. A quotation from Offen's editorial on the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski's collection of essays, A DEFENSE OF ARDOR, will provide useful bearings as to what he is looking for when making his choice of poems. Offen takes as his starting point that he is

prone to earnest pronouncements about what poetry is or what it should be.

In his poem THE FATTED CALF VIEWS THE PRODIGAL SON'S RETURN X. J. Kennedy is neither tepid nor conversational. This is a text richly marked by linguistic innovativeness and humour as we listen to the calf's tale of woe:

	Throat slit,
	drained dry
	my guts uncoiled like package twine

ten-year old girl is sure another hurricane is coming because weathermen don't know anything, because if they did, they'd surely have been able to help her, told her to evacuate.

The Coral Motel now the Oral Motel, which give her dad a good laugh.

Charles Harper Webb's poem APOLOGY FOR SUICIDE has something musical about it, despite the subject matter. Certainly his attention to the world is as much aural as visual. The poem records:

	Black pearl, pillbug, rat turd — babies love them all,
	A feather re-routes tantrums into awed delight.

	They all know where they were when it happened
	but none are sure why

Allison Joseph's PEDESTRIAN'S BLUES demands and rewards careful — often slow — reading. The poetic persona here is not one to be rushed; there is a calmness and an unpedantic care for her own safety that gains the reader's confidence and produces lines such as

	remember how sedate some of us are;
	we don't move quickly, slower now to bloom.
	My feet may be tired, but I've travelled this far,

	Prompted by spring it says
	'To be', perhaps naming itself.

	I lay them
	one by one
	on her bed
	they must all go
	the robin's egg
	the peacock
	the royal one
	she wore to my wedding
	this delphinium one
	wilted, yet still smelling
	sweet, spicy
	even this last one
	the price tag hanging on
	the sleeve.

Gerard Grealish's THE KITCHEN is an exploration of both his own personal background and, more extensively, of his relationship with a loved one. The sense of identity that underlies the text is complex:

	I cannot say
	what I wanted.  Home, perhaps,
	where, captured as they are, things happen,
	seem certain,
	don't change,
 
	as in this photograph
	where you are pictured happy and where
	my eyes are closed too.

	ride out
	And see if the grass is green.

	Your delusions with the boasts of condoms.

	and you
	and everything
	now

Antler's lengthy poem EACH SNOWFLAKE RINGS A BELL captures the quintessence of snowflakes, particularly in its final lines:

	Why is a blind girl's tongue so sensitive
	when a snowflake melts on her tongue
	she can feel and sense
	its antique design
	transported to her brain
	the instant before it melts
	the instant before air
	trapped inside the snowflake
	turns into bubbles
	that last less than a second
	but makes the sound of tiny ringing bells
	when they form inside her mouth?

This publication disproves the theory that there's no such thing as a free lunch, being distributed free to all 'serious' poets in the USA. In the editorial, Ron Offen discusses craft and art in the making of poetry, concluding that the two are

'different but the same, as the two sides of a coin are one thing'

'the craft of artistry of a worthwhile or significant poem depends on a poet's ability to meld the intuitive and the deliberately planned.'

	Spring arrived like a trailer of scrap.

James Reiss' ROSARITO BEACH compares nature's processes to those of the factory:

	When the shard of a 7-Up bottle
	sandblasted by breakers
	acquired a mette finish

	to check each leaf out on her own level,
	   holding each one up to her own sun,
	her eyes on fire when the wind rises and hundreds more
	   come floating down
	and she runs with tilted head across the glittering,
	   trembling ground.

The Free Lunch Mentor Series invites a prominent poet to introduce an unestablished poet of her or his choice. In this issue Ron Koertge introduces the work of Dina Hardy, including two surreal and compelling poems from her series ON THE ISLAND OF THE FIRE EATERS. From these and the other two poems published here, she appears to be a name to watch.

	if I name you crystals shatter when instead
	butterflies should move on my lips
	if I silence you I lose my reflection