NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

An independent small press poetry review

NHI independent review
Iodine
PO Box 18548
Charlotte
NC 28218-0548
USA
ISSN 1530-7476
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Latest issue appears to Vol. IX #1
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This page last updated: 22nd June 2008. 		Iodine Vol. V #2

A smattering of poets from England (Gerald England, Mark Murphy, Geoff Stevens) and one from Australia (John West) reveals maybe a lesser-known venue for good quality work from non-Americans among 54 contributors. A lot of poets hail from Charlotte itself which appears to possess a good density of talent.

Many contributions are 'action' poems without misty conclusions or excessive adjectival phraseology to slow them up and reduce impact. One rather strategically overblown item for the sake of conveyance of a rich colloquial range certainly held my primary attention. Others may differ in order of appraisal. This was Robert Cooperman's RANDALL SIXKILLER, EX-HELL'S ANGEL, AT A CHARLOTTE BRONTĖ CONFERENCE. Doubtlessly one should assume that it is clever fiction — it is also noteworthy that a story employing the 'Charlotte' word-syndrome might have been expected to attract the editor to the poem. Choice of a Hell's Angel (with double outlook or character) is justified in the final soft spot after the uncompromising opening, where the 'eggheads' are academics at a conference on the work of Charlotte Brontė:

	Okay, I can see you're wondering
	what a dude who rode under colors
	and spent time incarcerated    
	is doing with some pinky-raised eggheads
	canarying away about an English bitch
	who died 150 years ago.
The story goes that when Randall was in the prison library he read JANE EYRE by Charlotte; he became annoyed by Jane's treatment:
	... when poor Jane got railroaded
	by her spoiled fat ass cousin,
	I wanted to kick his lardy ass
	all over that house.
He has a cry over the end when Jane is reunited with Rochester. When he reads about the conference, he attends it, but is enraged when
	... one of these prissy professors
	I'd have made my bitch in the slam
	claimed Charlotte was homely
	as a mouse with buckteeth.
so, like protecting his biking mate:
	I decked him, a man ain't a man
	if he lets his old lady get dissed.
Although the issue is unspoiled for the reader by being weight-loaded with death, doom, and destruction, outright joy is rationed and optimistic existential overtones have a cautious note. In wake of 'nine-eleven' it could be expected — the end poem THE MAN WHO LOVED NEW YORK (Anthony S. Abbott) relates to the dissolution of the subject's dreams, and loss of enjoyment of TV entertainment while his
	... dreams dissolve in the dust of a thousand
	lost innocents ...  

	Now he could only think
	of the men and women filing down the stairs
	counting the number left till they were safe,
	and then the cloud rising, rising into the air,
	the cloud of what was left of all his dreams.
This journal can be purchased on-line via its website and aims to continue in another phase of expansion after a 5-year schedule from inception in 2001. I hope that the editor Jonathan K. Rice is successful in attracting more UK poets and subscribers without losing representation of work from home-town poets which have so ably supported him.

reviewer: Eric Ratcliffe.