NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

The focus of Sentinel Poetry Quarterly is on what editor Nnorom Azuonye calls the "international community of poets". And this is its main strength. In this issue there are poets from Italy, Nigeria, India, Southern Africa, and the USA as well as small press stalwarts from the UK. Poems cover a wide range of subects from social and political issues to thoughts on love and lust. The work is generally well-crafted and has something to say.

Obi Nwakanma's long poem, A QUIET FIRE BURNING, a meditation on suffering and the faith that somehow transcends it, is especially powerful:

	In a time of want
	the young leaves,
	those shrivelled shapes,
	are the unwrapped dead falling,
	lying shoeless on the road:

	A feast for dragonflies [...]

	Our vocation is silence: but to observe
	the soldier, oiling his guns, riding
	northwards to Baghdad — and to see
	all history, as the head of the camel,
	lifting from the ground, looking fifty knots
	into the horizon, nodding. Knowing
	how the jostle for a gaunt land, always
	leads to the desert.

	two bodies writhe and explode

	in civil handshakes

Besides the poems, there are two fascinating articles: THE INTERNET & POETRY by Gerald England (if this doesn't convince doubters of the value of poetry on the net, I don't know what will) and NIGERIA'S THIRD GENERATION POETRY by the passionate and knowledgeable Pius Adesanmi.

A magazine worth supporting.

This is the print magazine of the Sentinel Poetry Movement (founded by Nnorom Azuonye) which also runs a poetry forum, monthly poetry challenges, poetry competitions and an online poetry magazine. There is some excellent poetry on offer. Avik Chanda provides some tightly-controlled, observationally acute poems, as in NIGHT-PIECE:

			For a long time now,
	I've been watching the sea
	toss froth and moon-shimmer onto the sands.
	Flirt with the shore's shingled margin.

	Inside, light gathers like wet husk,
	clinging to the shape of prayers, sighs,
	draughts and coughs spreading like
	footfalls in the old chapel.

	And I said to myself: in a cold
	hopeless hour draped in hurt,
	God could choose for himself
	a spot like this, to pray.

	Pale beige after the dessication
	of an abnormally dry summer,
	the grass appeared brittle,
	a mineral that might be licked,
	but would crack molars.

	I know the past by heart,
	but the present possesses
	the eye: this vision,
	this slow-neuroned bag of shambling bones:

	And there was never any other.

The three-dimensional drive of Achebe's poetry is, therefore, conditioned by the tragic experience of his Igbo nation, a people and a land whose continuing oppression is metonymic of the larger African subjectification under neo-imperialist hegemony.

This issue also showcases the three winners of the Sentinel International Poetry Competition (July 2005), adjudicated by Martin Holroyd. The third placed poem, FARM HAND, by T.M. Dowling is again a minutely-observed piece that builds atmosphere, imagination and indeed fantasy upon the bare details of the scene:

	Today he was a silent movie.
	A frenzied man on a hill, striking blow
	After blow in the slanting rain,
	As if miming fierce aggression.