NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

This issue takes as its theme Reality Checks, and as the editors Eleni Zisimatos Auerbach and Joshua Auerbach explain in their introduction, their biggest issue yet presents snapshots of things real and unreal.

It opens with a poem by Harris Gardner entitled I-F, which begins humorously

	You wrote a reality check today

This is a bi-annual Montreal publication, hence no doubt the real and welcome interest in translation and language. The contributors are mostly but not exclusively Canadian, there are American, Irish and British poets too, known and lesser-known.

The review section offers an interesting interview with Paul Muldoon by the editor Joshua Auerbach, in which Muldoon talks of his relationship to language, to Irish, to English and American English and his love of Donne, then moves on tentatively to how he writes. It's interesting to see that unlike many poets, Muldoon doesn't go in for much touching up. He'll write a poem and leave it at that.

Among the reviews is a thought-provoking one by Harold Rhenisch on the Griffin Prize winning translation of Cιlan by Heather McHugh and Nikolai Popov. I'm not sure I agree with everything he says, either on the gnomic nature of German or on the prize winning translations. I do have a definite preference for Michael Hamburger's translation of the Cιlan poem in question. Anyway, the debate on the best way to betray is open.

The book is beautifully produced, a lot of effort has been put into collating it, there is something for everyone here; and it looks well worth the mere eight Canadian or five US dollars they are asking for it.

In this issue, there is a large section devoted to JAPANESE IMAGININGS. This section contains a number of translated pieces. One problem is that sources need to be clear to the reader — the source publication and the translator should be formally identified. Having recently reviewed THE SANTOKA, a book of poems of Taneda Santoka, translated by Scott Watson, I see that neither the source book, nor the translator's book (or original articles) were acknowledged, let alone the page and date of publication. Furthermore, it is important that readers are given, where possible, an indication of the date of death of the poet. Taneda Santoka is a very well-known twentieth century poet. The Japanese section provided reprints of previously published translations and this should not be confused with new and previously unpublished work, which readers usually expect in this type of journal.

This issue contains some substantial (new) poems. THE ELM DISMANTLED by Ross Leckie is a well-crafted piece:

	Through the summer's long hours they die too fast.
	The surgeon strides from tree to tree marking them
	with red dots but the workers fall behind.  The trees 
	stand waiting, patients in a doctor's waiting room.

	Eventually the efficient men arrive in a truck.
	In their headphones, plastic helmets and sunglasses
	they look like Jeff Goldblum in "The Fly,"
	a fur of sawdust clinging to their lumberjack shirts.

The tendency in THE NEW YORKER is to see the world beyond it as somewhat distant, while everything that is THE NEW YORKER is very vivid and bright and interesting. And they really do have a civilization that is self-sustaining and independent of the culture at large. I felt when I left that I'd been there a long time and it was time to move on. I had worked there longer than I'd worked at any other job, and I was anxious about my freedom. But it was an education. It was lucky for me that I managed to go from the PhD program at Columbia to THE NEW YORKER because I had the experience of the cloistered world at a very complex level, and then I had the experience of the secular world at a very complex level at THE NEW YORKER.

Like many magazines, Vallum presents a mixed read: some excellent work, some middling, and pieces here and there which defy all description and reasoning in their inclusion. This, the Desert issue is no exception, except that it presents the usual mixture in an extraordinary way — all the good stuff comes at the end, and as you flick back through the magazine the quality goes downhill rapidly.

Take Monika Lee's excellent review of Paul Auster's COLLECTED POEMS, for instance, capturing the essence of his work in two sentences:

Although Auster's language is unusually simple, accessible, pared down and compact, the philosophical conceptions in these poems are complex. The spareness of the language gestures toward philosophical questions and problems about being and reality.

	I live behind four windows.

	1.

	Out of one
	the way the irresistible world looks –

	the red-shafted flicker, a male, its inaudibly long
	beak finding ant upon ant on the edge of the driveway, clouds
	the precise metal of those disinfectant trays
	people step in before swimming

Even the editors' doubtful inclusion of their own work yields a lovely poem MIKHAEL by Helen Zisimatos:

	but I misunderstand the debate
	hands ticking erroneously
	time was further away
	in a desert enclosure

	and I miss you, angel
	like an old mirror misses silver

	I am

	eight, bladder full
	open to it half-awake releasing
	a rare stream so wet that it hisses     onto the grains
	cold so cold the moon-lit presence

		                              on my lips

	Explore the echoing curve of space carved from rock. Caress the precarious
	grains that adhere and form ribbed bulges worn by wind. Note the crystalline
	fault-lines falling crisply under the swiftly alternating heat cold heat of summer.

This kind of work, ill-disciplined and self-conscious, is scattered throughout the first fifty pages. The ordinary reader will probably not make it to the quality work at the back. However, the last quarter of Vallum: Contemporary Poetry 4.1 is well worth reading. Perhaps the Canada Council for the Arts should spring for an edited chapbook?

There are plenty of Canadian journals who publish Canadian poetry, reviews and essays and they all serve the purpose of fostering the Canadian identity and promoting Canadian culture. The Dandelion, Arc, and Taddle Creek Magazine are just a sampling of many journals from Nova Scotia to British Columbia who showcase Canadian poetic talent. This of course is a worthy cause and there are plenty of fine Canadian poets who do not get the attention they deserve outside of Canada. Granted some are publishing in the UK as well as getting book deals in Germany and Italy and so on. But have you heard of them? Probably not; poetry is a rare and savage bird. So many scrap over so little.

But why the lack of recognition for Canadian poets? Geography might be one reason; the US has long dominated North American literature so that many very good Canadian poets — outside of Margaret Atwood, Leonard Cohen and Irving Layton — haven't got a look see. Is this fair? Maybe. Maybe not. There is the matter of size and population. Let's just say that Pierre Trudeau once said that being situated next to the United States was like sleeping next to an elephant. Anxiety, anyone?

Another post 911 reason could be the annual Griffin Award which awards a very large international prize (CAN$40,000) for international poets and very large, separate (CAN$40,000) prize for Canadian poets. This mystifies as surely it sends out the wrong message to the world: one for us, because "we are special" and one for "the rest of you" because you have to fight it out with the rest of them. Surely this is like a father rewarding a "favourite" son not taking into consideration the other children in the neighborhood.

So for this reason, Vallum is a welcome addition to the many Canadian journals which publish poetry. One of the honourary board members is the fine Africadian poet, George Elliot Clarke and the other honorary board member, Brit, D.M Thomas. Whether or not they influence the editorial content is difficult to say but the poets and reviews are international: Bloodaxe poets are reviewed with poets from the Mercury Press in Toronto and the journal is attractively designed so that the poetry and arts comprise the first two thirds of the book, while the many reviews and essays are featured in the final third of the book in a fetching grey tone. One of the most compelling essays is Kevin Higgins' examination of slam poetry by the establishment (he argues that — heaven forbid — entertainment, might be a good thing) He also argues that North American Slam poetry could re-energize a dawdling Irish poetry scene. Also highlighted is an essay by Monika Lee about Leonard Cohen's last book of poetry which topped the bestsellers lists, remarkably, on May 25th. Cohen is viewed as still the sacred sage, and still the aging sensualist

seeing female genitalia as a shrine, cunnilingus as a form of religious worship.

instances of true emotion beneath the iceberg.