NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

An A4, 28 page magazine containing poems, articles, and stories. Overall, the standard is reasonably high, although some of the poems seem a little wordy. The format is pleasing, with writing interspersed with little sketches by different artists. Susan Carmen's poem, MARCHING ORDERS, has a light-hearted touch:

	My neighbor's lawn is Emerald City green,
	trimmed like a Marine's
	buzz cut, short and tight,
	not a blade out of place.

	She tells me how he
	laughed at a picture
	of me and my boyfriend;
	our heads together,
	smiling, goofy, drunk.
	I pace myself,
	redwoods and firs
	surround us.

	sun shines on snow-scape
	we are flying
	above the clouds

	spreading wobbly marmalade
	at 29,000 feet

	Schiphol Airport
	miles and miles of walkways
	between the gates

This is a 28-page magazine, bound in gray card, folded to North American A4 size, with the contents arranged in one, two or three columns. In this issue's REGULARS section, there are two editorials (both interesting ones) and a very useful column called WEB NOTES, which gives a brief précis of several web-sites dealing with matters of interest to readers and authors who want to learn more about recent developments in web resources. This is an unusual feature for a magazine of this kind, and it is a very welcome one, I think. There is also one short story, fourteen monochrome illustrations by various artists, and a total of forty-six poems by thirty-two poets. The editors describe the magazine's stance as 'modernist rather than post-modernist', and this is evidenced clearly in the work published.

My favourite poem here is the curiously-titled piece, JIFFY POP FOR JESUS, by Donna Biffar, in which pop-corn effectively becomes a symbol for the colonization of the Americas. The poem begins with the immediate, or post-colonial experience:

	Long after she sent us to bed I listened
	for the spill of seeds against metal,
	the sound of parched corn popping
	into Cortes' white flowers
	crushed beneath the teeth of conquest.

	we dug our nails into the cob meat,
	yanked the teardrop seeds
	and peered into our blue glass jars,
	blue as the sky should be—

Other poems in very different styles are also impressive. Patrick Dobson's NEW LIGHT sequence is vivid and controlled, and I especially like the concluding lines:

	the river
	mirrors ignited
	wineglasses of sun

	I should confess
	I was once the angel
	who pressed his hands  over the Virgin's lips.

	This afternoon, I'll get on my knees
	to wash the church steps
	and paint her robe a deeper shade of blue.

	the next day you return,
	dressed like a black swan,
	and drive me to a dreamy alleyway
	where you sit on a stone step,
	your chin on your knees,
	wind whistling in our ears,
	and you talk about love and salvation.
	you see right through me,
	to the confusion,
	but you smile with dark eyes and long lashes,
	waiting to bring order through innocence.

This issue comprises a few articles and over seventy mostly very well-executed and accessible poems, many often chatty and quirky, though some at times a little too self-obsessed and diary-like. There are also little bits of artwork, mostly simple pencil drawings, scattered about the place. There is an original prose poem by Fredrick Zydek, LETTER TO MARSHALL ABOUT FIRE AND TIME:

understanding what the flames did to time was the great discovery. It made men brave late into the night; it scared off their enemies and it gave them time to tell tales of the day. Language must have bloomed by that light and where children first learned to whine, hoping to stay up late and listen to tales of the hunters and the hunted.

	Everyone speaking with sounds you can't understand
	walking straight lines excreting in porcelain bowls
	moving heaven and earth to get into other wombs
	smiling at bosses who don't smile back

	With his fine blond hair streaming in the wind
	from a noisy electric fan,
	Kemp reads in his metaphysical text
	that the seat of the human soul
	is probably the pineal gland, tucked under the
	brain, and not, as Kemp is convinced,
	a golden throne on the dark side of
	the silvery moon.

	This bit of misinformation from the
	smug and ignorant book
	so pisses off Kemp
	that he flings it through the open door of his
	gloomy Memphis apartment,
	and it lands open
	on the burnt grass.

	But I ask myself why I saw that one
	on his truck and not the more romantic
	"Thou Shalt Not Steal," "Kill," "Commit
	Adultery," and then I wonder what happened
	To "Thy Neighbour's Ass"—maybe not so good
	for the back of a truck barreling
	through a red state close to Kingdom City, MO
	in the bleak and blurry weather, cold rain
	pouring down like The Great Flood.

	There, near a grove, a papoose
	in tones hollow as coyote howls
	echoing across plains
	once free for buffalo.
	His wails would wake us,
	if we were able to sleep,
	stuck here in a cabin
	not far from a battlefield.

And now I realize that everyone of us already knows everything I've just written, that we all have the same anxiety as we face our mugs in the mirror and ask how we have the nerve to dream that we love and know enough to write poems at all! "Ah," one of us sighs, "I'll bet there's a poem in that."