NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

An A5 booklet that is issued once a year. A coffee-time light read, but some of the subject matter is quite heavy. The centre pages are visuals. A favourite piece is Nathan Parker's

	SOULSCAPE WITH A SHRINKING CRAYON

	intensity
	broke out of the canvas boundaries
	absorbing our senses
	blended paint flow
	crawling colors on the loose

Twenty three poets are featured in Vol XIV of this magazine under the current editorship of Marcia Arrieta, and as the title suggests the ethos of the work is about the use of space, often graphically exploited on the page by the use of pattern, photography and the manipulated surfaces of the visualingual poems of Andrew Topel. In this anthology there are serious questions being asked. The enigmatic, almost algebraic puzzle posed by Marton Koppany in THE SECRET takes the idea of abstraction full circle, where everything is in parenthesis

The cleverly manipulated map of ancient Greece peppered with aphoristic phrases by Ray Hsu reminds us of old history lessons steeped in Homer:

	the weight of
	a body
	on your spear

	Go among them
	unharmed: this
	is a story

	What if that which equals silence. Then generous breath. As if they know what to.

	When the colour is clear. Praying, will I know it's. Please know that, even if. As.

	feeling fills space
	i recall water

	the future

	and the past in between

	I love her now

	in the design of a fugue
	by chance.   by encounter.
	silent.   imagined.
	wild grass  &  river

I'm afraid I had great difficulty extracting much pleasure from reading this magazine. There is a lot of open-ended, and — to me — inconsequential navel gazing that simply fails to engage me as a reader. There is much messing-about with fonts, there are visual tics of the kind I thought went out in the 1960s and which are certainly no advance on the work of Cummings or Pound.

Fernando Aguiar's untitled visual in which a heap of letters makes a kind of landscape is quite effective, but I had to wait until Diane Webster's brilliant little NESTING HABITS before I found a poem I really liked:

	Sparrow picks through
	abandoned leaf pile
	like bag lady searching
	half-eaten sandwiches,
	aluminum cans,
	or silken scarf
	frayed on one end.

	Float
	a loft.

Look — concrete poetry! and, look — surrealism!