NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

HQ POETRY MAGAZINE, otherwise known as THE HAIKU QUARTERLY, is edited by Kevin Bailey. This issue has a total of fifty-five contributors, including one review and one brief editorial. Contributors are identified by name and place of origin, but the only other details given about them is, where appropriate, a list of their recent publications. The page layout is very clear, with only occasional fillers, and no distracting advertising.

On the whole, I found the poetry inventive and dynamic, often experimental and varying widely in style. Nevertheless, given the journal's title, it is somewhat surprising to find that the overwhelming majority of the poems are not after all haiku. Still, some of the fine pieces include Ian Caws's THE NIGHT WATCH, with its nervous, ironic disavowal of complicity:

	It truly must have been somebody else.
		There they will remember my restlessness
	after a night without sleep and my pulse
		changing rhythm, stopped by the earnestness,
	the urgency in that picture.

	I would take each part to my mouth or simply look
	and go on looking, and it wouldn’t lose anything by this
		or grow ugly or commonplace

The editor's evident good taste and, indeed, daring in choosing poems with such a wide spectrum of themes and styles, is invigorating and makes for a rewarding read. Strangely though, this rigorousness in literary matters is fused with an intrusive style in the peripheral materials. That is, the editorial is a somewhat bitter rant about a rival journal; the single book review included positively vituperates against its subject; and, laudable as it may be in principle, the fillers throughout bear an overtly anti-war message, running, as it were, as a series of captions to the main pages. With so much talent on display it seems a pity to frame it with a rancor that threatens to alienate readers unnecessarily. Success of the kind shown in the poems is a far better revenge for the "wrongs" decried there than straightforward oratory.