NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

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Borderlines
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This page last updated: 14th December 2007. 		Borderlines #33

BORDERLINES is a mature magazine that gives the reader poetry, and very little else. It achieves this so successfully that it merits several rereadings.

It's a publication that eshews page numbers, editorials, contents lists or reviews. The distinctive size, somewhere between A4 and A5, is a clue to understanding the carefully considered and independent values that allow each poem a proper space where it can be enjoyed.

Because the reader is not distracted by trimmings or trivialities, any mediocrity would be easy to spot. Unsurprisingly, the degree of thought that underpins the character of BORDERLINES is reflected in the editorial selection. Indeed, the poems are discretely but intelligently marshalled, moving through a range of subject matter and genres.

The first eight poems achieve a collaborative sense of rural borderlands which is bright with detail. Angie Quinn binds a series of fine images into the rhythmical opener, ENCHANTMENT. It concludes:

	a dead dog fox had gone to ground
	suspended, bound, in silent earth.
This indicates that landscapes explored in forthcoming pages will be unsentimental, but almost tangible, as in CRUGYBYDDAR by Rhiannon Hooson. We are drawn to a distant childhood:
			the valley heavy
	with the smell of ramsons, a pale
	carpet of stars in the wood.
The starry metaphor echoes what Andrew Lumborg extrapolates from a walk down a lonely path, with the thoughts it conjures 
	like stars on the night-wind.
Many moments and ideas interconnect in BORDERLINES, and they do so particularly well in the series of about twelve poems that explore bereavement.

No editor is short of submissions on this theme, but Kevin Bamford and Dave Bingham have the taste and judgement to make the thread connecting these pieces the stronger — because of such diverse talent in their authors. THE HOSPITAL GARDEN anticipates death, in its brittle portrayal of life, Dan Wyke being one of several who can create pathos that sidesteps the bathetic:

	On the way home, my numb hands
	could still feel your bones,
	bird-thin beneath your fur.
Emma Lee, in a contrasting tribute, achieves a similarly memorable conclusion. ABSENCE, which celebrates the life of a singer, holds back until the end a pivotal metaphor, which encapsulates his suicide:
	The mic stand's a conqueror's flag pole.
	You claimed your own life.
New forms appear on most new pages of BORDERLINES. The longest poem, Mark Farrell's JOHN, tells the tale of a mother's first visit to a son's grave — years after his death. What appears to be a linear narrative is fractured by the waves of free verse, spreading across the page, and the diverging thoughts of the narrator (and younger brother). Like the Prodigal's brother, he remembers the ordinariness which John was spared:
	plates smashed in anger, mortgages,
	broken collarbones, birthday ice-cream,
	car accidents, steeped tea.
Towards the end of this issue, the editors have included some effective examples of visual and concrete forms, Michael W. Thomas contributing a cornucopia of connected Spanish imagery, presented in a vertical pillar of words where no line has more than four syllables. It has the effect of a an evocative collage:
	balcony
	hydrangea
	wrestles breeze
	palm languor
	laps iron
Bryan Banks' ISLANDS IN THE STREAM, encases most of his stanzas in line boxes, creating a visually successful poetic archipelago. The size and format of the magazine enables these (and many other) poems to be appreciated properly.

Three other items are worthy of mention. First, Dylan Harris impresses with NEW YEAR'S EVE, a brief but razor-sharp depiction of a pub:

		she's occupying clothes
	that leave so much caress undressed.
Second, editor Dave Bingham's retirement (mentioned with characteristic understatement) should be matched by recognition and gratitude for the fine magazine that he and Kevin Bamford have nurtured.

Finally, a piece by Giovanni Malito, printed shortly after his death and quoted in its entirety:

	equilibration

	the gods look down
	from their bland heavens
	envious of men,
		their turbulence

	and men look up
	from their spinning world
	envious of the gods,
		their calm contentment.

reviewer: Will Daunt.