NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

Well-produced, classy-looking magazine with masses of poetry, including a number of prose poems. Despite this issue having a fair dose of competent and effective poems, there is also a smattering of obtuse and chant-like pieces, replete with lists and truncated syntax, that have an irritating mix of artful simplicity of tone and clever obscurity of meaning, like poetry is a code you have to break. Here is an example from a prose poem, OVERLOOKING THE RIVER, by Brigitte Byrd:

	What is really important she thinks when she walks
	through a crossroad and her hipbone sets her on the 
	edge like a door. If there is chocolate powder why do 
	they not eat oatmeal. She calls an old friend when the
	future scares them stiff from a desk.

	My husband whose arms are bridges of rescue
	His shoulders stones for borrowed tombs
	His back the chimney I lean against
	His back of lodgepole pine
	His back the crow's rusted voice and its nest in the black rock cliff
	My husband whose navel is the center of an orbit
	His hips the heart of a broken saint
	My husband whose thighs are bows for a fiddle

	All these fundamentalist nuts, in Washington, in Europe, in
	Israel, Afghanistan, Iraq. All these castrating crazed, 
	completely irresponsible fanatics stoking the fires for World
	War III, and I'm the one in therapy. That's the world I live in.

	The suds rinse
	down the drain
	like spiraling rainbows,
	creating in her
	kitchen an insignificant nebula.
	       She
	believes she loves
	this even more
	than God.

		I wasn't to know
	I cried but it was
		their laughter that hurt

	Out of film, my father drove off
	to the drugstore, always with me
	in tow. I remember my feet dangling,
	white lace socks, black shoes.

	when i had lived 3 days longer than his stump of life...a  
	primitive animal such as a starfish he once taught me will grow
	a new identical limb if it loses one...its body just reaches out
	and inhabits the precise space left empty by the loss

	From the mirror
	A dust of years
	Has leapt onto my temples.

I didn't know where to start with reviewing this! I found myself so entirely lost in the wealth of excellent poetry of all styles and covering so many different subjects that I really found it difficult to encapsulate the essence of the publication! So I'll start at the beginning with David Lazar's AND TESTAMENT one of the best of several prose poems in this issue:

I don't understand colors or music, since both require you to listen too closely

	the dishes drying in the wooden rack

	they couldn't know
	each others' hearts

	A thousand ships depart from Marseilles. Melina's already asleep in your lap.
	On a whim you say you'd like to go to Illium. The taxi man smiles
	beneath a full moustache, puts the flag up, points the cab east.

	cut from your mother's dress

	How can you know that I'll speak 
	in a stranger's language?
	That my poems will be more like red
	scraps than the words that you love?

A very different poem is Larry Starzec's BLEEDING ULCER, which is painfully and graphically about just exactly what you may expect it to be about. Read this poem, but not just before lunch and not if feeling ill! Georgia Scott also tackles the difficult topic of illness in THERE ARE WORSE THINGS THAN THIS, but rather than graphic detail, she uses understatement and humour:

	When you wear your hat indoors
	and the family's toothbrushes in your pocket.
	call it fashion. 
	So little is new, you'll be admired.

	We arrived 
	at the diminished 
	myth we are.

And that's not all. There are also excellent poems by Faith Shearin, Martha Modena Vertreace-Doody, Cyril Wong, Jessican Jopp and Jeff Mann (who gives us some very sobering poems about urban desolation).

The back cover of this magazine carries a quote from Poets Market saying

one of the best reads in the poetry publishing world