NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

Billed as The free literary magazine of the North, it would be almost impossible for Northwords Now to be considered poor value. A reader might wonder why such a good magazine is free. It has a liberal mix of poetry, stories, fine photos, articles and reviews, enabling it to appeal to a varied readership. A readership that most probably would be willing to pay a modest sum for such an interesting read. If this were so, it might be that Highlands and Islands and The Scottish Arts Council, etc., could then increase their subsidies to less popular and more specialized publications. An appropriate subsidy might be to the very publication mentioned in the magazine's article: THE ACHIEVEMENTS OF A GAELIC PUBLISHING COMPANY — I quote:

Gaelic Publishing is a field which is full of challenges: high publication costs, a small market and the reluctance of shops to stock Gaelic books, to name but a few, but LEABHRAICHEAN BEAGA has continued, doggedly, to publish at least two titles each through all the difficulties.

	Apollo summer. Spacesuit first-foots
	gathering rocks on pre-dawn telly,
	sending seismic data to Earth.
	The movement of what's in the ground.

	We'd visit our special burial Glen:
	rich with cairns and henges, cists,
	astronomy  swirls, hypnotic circles.
	Signs that say that I am here.

	The mariner or orienteer
	looks to the visible faults,
	nested on, dashed with white

	along the climb or the fall
	of volcano's breaking.

	...
	
	A meeting of cloudbanks.
	First hint of coming fronts.

Northwords Now is a well-planned quality magazine; it should be of great interest to all readers (North or South of the Border).