NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

There is quite a testing selection of poetry here in these combined issues. WHAT POWER OR INTELLIGENCE by Richard Burns is itself a lengthy extract from a long poem:

		Are destinies governed by motive?
	Or by unpredictable dice-throws, spins on fortune's
	roulette? And justice? Is there any?

	Why this beautiful athlete and that dwarf or cripple?
	Why this one in a wheelchair from birth and that one
	deaf, dumb, blind? Why such uneven distribution
	of nature's wealths and gifts?

Philip Kuhn's work is full of isolated, vividly-drawn images, as in this example from a selection of work taken (again) from a longer piece, BLESSED BYGONES IN THE CAPTIVE MEMORY:

 
	the short life of the cut flower    deprived of light
	a memory              of what it was like
	to feel grief held in check

	Patterns are transported across the river
	in complicated ripples, like the river
	on a windy day of confused reflections.

	I know someone is pulling a rope
	attached to a promise. I know
	my heart is in the right place.

	never a white space in nature
	lost stone in a windswept moor

	teems buzzard circled
	lark-staccato
	kestrel eyeing
	the hopping grasses

	Senility is attuned to the day's inflections
		outside evening's white gulls roll on endless blue

After climbing the mountain, he arrived at the monastery during a snowstorm, and was given hot gruel by the monks. A child's tent, decorated with cartoon characters, on the balcony. I dreamt I was sitting with a woman on the roof of a tall building; birds were flying overhead, and I became giddy as they swooped lower and lower. You stood at the railings, watching the man in a skiff row past the pier. Tower blocks, barges, cranes, posts, reflected and blurred in the water.

After some of these serious-minded lengthy tomes John Levy's lighter, shorter and more integrated pieces come as something of a relief, as in TUCSON, FOUR DAYS:

	after Halloween the two pumpkins up
	on the tall white wall de-

	compose, softening, co-

	llapsing, open-

	mouthed, folding
	in

	on themselves, their
	empty carved out

	smiles, wrinkled

	as if in the last stages
	in a nursing home.

	I prefer walks with a decided destination, and I fear the 
	scrutiny of reunions, so each turn of a corner presented an
	ambivalent moment.

	you are what I can never be
	you are a summer's day on the shore of Greenland
	you are as wise as the flaring of spontaneous
			jungle fires
	you are silent as the bed of the Red Sea
	you shine as the eyes of a pharaoh

SHEARSMAN 69 & 70 is an immensely readable journal. Quirky but serious, its contents are intelligent and challenging. There is nothing in the way of a letter from the editor, no reviews clutter up its pages. The only content besides that of the worshipfully revered poems is an essay by Peter Makin on Roy Fisher. Insightful and complete, this essay contains none of the elite smugness that you can find in other journals.

To consider the poems as 'worshipfully revered' is the only way I can describe them. The poem has not been made to fit the page; the page has been made to accommodate the poem. Space is a luxury SHEARSMAN revels in. In fact, it almost personifies itself as a smug schoolboy demonstrating his page's acres of space. Everything about SHEARSMAN screams class. The sedate Times New Roman, the smaller font (which could annoy the reader that may be visually impaired), the glossy cover and overall quietness of the volume.

Anyway, less I digress further and continue this personifying critique of the overall sensation this collection projects, the poems are really what you want to know about. They are quiet; they fit the spec of the book and are quietly modernist. In SHEARSMAN 69 & 70, the overall feeling of the poems is of an avant-garde coffee house. It puts me in mind of Audrey Hepburn in the film FUNNY FACE when she goes to Paris and does that wonderful jazz scene in the basement of a smokey art café. Like Audrey, the poems in this book twirl from one page to the next, kick out their impressions the way she kicked out her legs, tightly constrict their metaphors as she curled herself in a ball and vividly projects their ideas as she did her slight frame. You can almost hear the shimmery sound of the brush on the drums.

There is not one poem that stands out to me. They all melt one into the other. It is to his credit that Tony Frazer has merged his selection so thoroughly. SNOW MELT by Paul Batchelor is an excellent example.

	melt & make
	no noise — this life,
	this crucible
	of accidents
 
	*
 
	is ice what happened
	when water forgets
	how to be anything
	else?

Quiet, constrained, and infinitely arresting. Elizabeth Robinson's poem from THE WOMAN IN WHITE is another quietly perfect poem.

	What the narrator supposed was perfect
	                        was the creature in its white fur
	                        struggling soundlessly in the trap
	          Perfect, yes, camouflage         Hence the field
	                makes white snow to fall upon itself
	                            Blemishless

SHEARSMAN 69 & 70 is a great volume to add to your collection. Incredibly readable, it makes me wish there were more journals out there like this one. While it is serious, it is not elitist, and while it is subtly experimental, it is not alienating. Tony Frazer has done an incredible job in creating a journal that is everything you could possibly want it to be, and more. I give it a 10 out of 10. It is the perfect journal for the poetry lover.

Shearsman poetry can be like the proverbial hair in the soup. And at the outset it must be said that it will not be to everybody's taste. Casual readers may even choke a little on it. And maybe that's a good thing.

So what's it all about, this Shearsman poetry — this assemblage of work from 25 cerebral poets? Dennis Barone a Professor of English at West Hartford, Connecticut contributes a couple of pieces. FRIENDSHIP contains the following:

	And then we ran quickly to the water because our feet were on fire. 
	When we dove into it the cold shocked us at first, but then we got used
	to it and we went out farther into it .

Richard Deming lectures in the English Department at Yale University. Maybe his work is the crème de la crème I'm seeking. There seems to be a nod in the direction of Ted Hughes in THE SOUND OF THINGS AND THEIR MOTION which begins:

	All night, the blank page.
	All night, the unopened book beat its black wings against the glass,
	and I woke, forgetful.

 
	an unstained coffee mug, a cigarette burned to ash.
	An iris rots in a vase above the fireplace.

	some infinitely stuttering thing.

	the day without words the day when my throat has
	stayed hollow the day of the lost afternoons and
	nights that never come the day without time without
	voice .

	He also ran after leaves of paper which had been
	taken from him and which might disappear in 
	the crowd about to pass by 

		At a quarter past eight the train
		could still be caught

	The Thief from Talan face to face