NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

Issue 16 is a themed issue dealing with various poetic perceptions of the Sixties. The opening Editorial shows the difficulty of picking a theme as open as this, by the opening out of the theme to material that demonstrates 'the Spirit of that age.' The Editor discusses the confluence of influences during that time, when it seemed that it was a decade of 'genuine excitement' in writing. Writers like Plath were coming into vogue and the Beat poets from the US showed how poetry could become more exciting.

Sally Evans captures the transient nature of trying to encapsulate that era in END OF THE SIXTIES, when she ends the poem on,

	It took years for it to come true.

	Cherry-bum trousers,
	medals, brass buttons, stripes

Eddie Woods humourously debunks his Sixties as a late epiphany, in WOODSTOCK WITHOUT THE MUD:

	But I got there eventually, to the Sixties,
	Maybe got there even better.
	In the Seventies.
	The Eighties.
	Into the Nineties.

This is described as an 'international issue'. We may start with the two reviews, each contributed by Richard Livermore the editor — the first a book of translations from Goethe's poetry by D.M.Black published from Perthshire; the second, which is particularly important in view of changes in attitude to the gay scene, being a most perceptive welcome to the issue of PINK NARCISSUS in DVD format.

Preceding are poems by Barry Fitton, Dominic Robert Costa, Yuyutsu R.D. Sharma, Ted Jackson, Beth Junor, J.L. Williams, Hsien Min Toh, and K.V. Skene. These are mixed with prose items by Bart Plantenga, John Bennett (2), and Eddie Woods. FITTON is a short-line buff, but the arrangement does little for the poetry. More cohesive is THINKING HE WANTS TO by Costa, and the subject is a somewhat furtive sexual adventure. LAMENT FOR GUANTANAMO BAY by Junor effectively brings its shame home to global roost in the last verse:

	Guantanamo Bay is mourning,
	singing a voice less song,
	voiceless choirs of the Other Than.
	O Unknown Prisoner —
	it's we who may never return
	to full humanity.

Chanticleer Magazine publishes prose as well as poetry and a variety of reviews. The material is varied in style, from the formal control of Karen Margolis' poetry to the eccentric modernism of Deborah Tyler-Bennett's and Kevin Cahill's poems. The exposure of self in the lengthy poem IRENE'S SEIGE, by Thomas Land is consistently, sometimes alarmingly honest.

The poems here are fairly unconventional and sharp. The most distinct poems are POETRY IS DANGEROUS (Karen Margolis) and Thomas Land's IRENE'S SIEGE. The former tells us that POETRY IS — DANGEROUS / IF YOU'RE AFRAID OF CHANGE. We get the point of view of the poet in a sequence of nine poems as she tells us in what ways poetry is dangerous or harmful to one's health:

	Reading a poem can result in:
	heavy breathing
	accelerated heartbeat
	churning guts
	hot flushes and cold sweats
	tingling toes & fingers
	hair standing on end
	pricked-up ears
	moistened lips
	dry mouth, chattering teeth

	I begin with the overcrowded single bed,
	my home in winter of 1944
	when public affairs assumed a dismaying mask
	and the threat of panic was graver even than death.
	It wasn't very wide and it lacked a headboard,
	its pillows were soaked in moisture from the wall
	inside the entrance of the air-raid shelter
	beneath a Nazi Arrowcross Party centre,
	I shared that bed through the siege of Budapest
	with Irene, my mother, and my two big brothers,
	one just 11, the other turning 15,
	a Jewish family petrified in hiding.

Deborah Tyler-Bennett's MAXIMAL ANTHEMS (sub-titled LOOK, IMPROVING COLOUR and SONNET LASTING UNTIL CEILINGS FALL) is skilfully written, with a precise choice of words and relatively open meanings. The images are strong and occasionally surrealistic, as in

	the ceiling's coming down
	under the weight of something interesting
	...
	trees commute
	from stick to leaf and back
	...
	The Dandy stretches fingers, elegant
	from inside a computer's flickering screen,
	fingertips fluttering the surface

	Plumb depth.  The eel lives
	At the perpendicular drop
	Where water ton on ton
	Presses graces.  He's at home here.

	the lurid children are ruined in their lewd flesh

	It was a sport of a kind
	To dump a child
	Blaring, naked
	In the Roman sewer

There is an elegance here, though some of the poems in the journal are quite lengthy. My favourite moment is probably from Nina Zivancevic's THE AMERICAN EMBASSY, where the persona is

	locked up in a building
	with shiftless faces

	Use one of these 'de luxe' blue toilets
	At times when I happen to be in a hurry

I think Gordon Brown ought to feel embarrassed by taking over from Tony Blair.

As for ol' Gordon, fugitive refugee from a 'soon to be liberated Scotland' that he is: enjoy your 15+ minutes of paltry fame while they last, buddy. Having made the wrong choice for your future and ours, you don't deserve anything better.

When I was a boy of 12, two Japanese warriors surrendered to my school bus. It was 1950, on Guam. The warriors had been living in the jungle on papayas and snails for five years. They didn't know that the war had ended, they weren't sure it ever happened. The war had turned to a dream.

Richard Livermore's DO NOT LAUGH AT THE NATIVES covers six pages. In general, there is an air of sophistication about Livermore's work from his introduction to this novel extract:

5' 3" tall, slender in build, with arms so thin most men could get their hands all the way round, 17 yr. old Mike Daniels is the original seven-stone weakling. He is, however, extremely good-looking. In denial regarding his true sexuality, fed up with being sent to the same crumby jobs by The Job Centre, he decides to seek freedom by becoming a vagabond and hitch-hiking his way round the country.

The extract convinces us that this has the beginnings of a very good novel. The characters are rich and textured enough to sustain the themes of

New Labour's Britain, the Iraq War, and the War on Terror in general, the government's attacks on civil liberties and personal freedom, globalisation, New Labour's promotion of a parasitical service- economy — of which Mike, as a rent boy, is an exemplar.

it provides me with an opportunity to expatiate on certain cultural themes.

The ways people are individuated is always a more interesting theme in art than identity, be it class, ethnic, national, sexual or religious identity . . .