NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

Issue 99 of WEYFARERS features a generous selection of poetry from Veronica Aldous, Viv Apple, Dorothy Aitken, Pat Buik, Maurice Butterworth, and many more. Some poets are represented by one poem and others by two or three poems. There is also a critical essay on Yeats' poem THE WILD SWANS AT COOLE by Jeffrey Wheatley, and seven pages of short reviews of magazines and collections by Stella Stocker.

After a thoughtful reading of these poems, the voices become more distinct and identifiable. Reading these works made me question the aesthetics of poetry and what motivates someone to write poetry. I am as interested in what they say, as I am in how they've chosen to craft that "saying".

In TEA FOR TWO Ken Champion's voice is complex and vibrant. He explores the idea of an ageing couple where the man is looking after the woman,

	Clawing grim hands under fleshless arms
	he shuffles her into the hall
	dropping her in the stair lift

	I want to play
	with boys
	so they like me

	I said I'd like to kill you with a collapsing knife
	and keep the punishment on film

	the moon's shutter
	its eye upon the dying boy

	Once in light I saw her mind
	(Charcoal & the imprints of butterflies)
	Now I know her eyes are categorical & burnt
	Into the memory of ink
	As I trace the outline of her face
	With a brand

Donna Pucciani's three poems, HARVEY AND RITA, ENGLAND AGAIN and WEST NILE QUEEN are witty and incisive. Her control over the craft of poetry is confident and she develops images effectively, as in the poem WEST NILE QUEEN

	Absently he slaps his arm
	where the biter has left her mark
	on the inky outline of an anchor, cross and heart,
	pushes his hardhat backwards
	and wipes his face in a single gesture
	under the noonday sun.

There is an unstudied freshness in Rosemary Wagner's HANDS — as she finds quirky details in the variety of her

	envy in hands
	...
	I look at the young men's sharp-boned digits
	or the white, fluttering pencils of girls

	Lay its crinkled body in your palm,
	assess its light weight:
	look at its wrinkled tan like the skin
	of an ancient face.

	After Mozart's sunlit waterfall,
	Schumann's dark clouds,
	but as the storm broke in the orchestra,
	whispers behind us —
	a different drama.

No fizzy bubbles to mark the 100th issue of the magazine now in its 34th year. No looking back, no looking forward, no taking stock, no hint of anything to celebrate; nothing, zero, nix, zilch. It's very much like the feeling you get when discover that you're too old for Christmas; a kind of exciting disappointment. It's only the number on the corner of the cover that gives the game away.

In addition to the 37 poems which make up the issue co-editor Stella Stocker provides several pages of reviews.

Michael Newman is one of my favourite contemporary poets and his rustic poem THE PHOTOGRAPH provides the icing for the non-existent editorial cake. It is a piece that can stand comparison to (or is it with) R. S. Thomas's famous ON THE FARM poem. Note the subtle shift from hard to soft consonants halfway through the 3rd line of the opening verse of THE PHOTOGRAPH:

	First in the frame,
	Edwin Grimmett,
	Farmworker — itinerant at that,
	Keeping his head above debt
	Like a bobbing buoy

On the facing page Desmond Graham's poem SUNDAY with its homely weekend claustrophobia and curious innuendo complements THE PHOTOGRAPH. Good choice there from Martin Jones, in the editorial chair for the birthday issue. Here's a snippet from the middle of SUNDAY:

	released to Sundays
	to the brown corduroy chair
	from his mother
	packing down his Gold Block
	sending a spark or two
	from under his finger

	When I opened the shutters a bluebottle came to life and 
	buzzed madly about the room, crashing into windows and even 
	walls. Then when I sat down and tried to read it zoomed

	grazed grey persons plodding back
	from the till
	with Friday cones of orange flowers

	Dark oil wounds bruise the empty concrete bays.

	ruminating in straw-spilled light

The 100th edition of WEYFARERS, despite its lack of celebratory editorial, is well worth the cover price.

Join the party. The bubbly is in the ice bucket.

There is a delightfully 'cruel' poem at the beginning of this issue, HOUSEPROUD, exploring what might happen if children weren't as well protected as they are these days. Dustbustin' Kids could well be the name of a new venture in exploitation and shows the black humour of the poet at work here:

	I have a fine collection of borrowed children
	stacked like wig wearing walking sticks

	my hands touched the keys
	that Lorca had played

	and later I cried
	as if I had shaken his hand.

	Humphey Davy offered him nitrous oxide
	which made him like the sound of a harp

	but it was more serious than that —
	laughter one could die from

	in a cold room where a kettle's boiling.

OWNERSHIP by Joanna M. Weston uses two quick images of the dog owner and the dog thus:

	an old woman
	with a large dog
	moves through shadow
	that absorbs her
	completely

	the dog walks
	in sunlight.

	Very sharp and very beautiful.

	the light is evidence
	it is Giotto's fingerprint

	below the altar screen
	I was holiday eighteen
	Ignorant sure and angry

	unfingered by anyone