NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

Crannóg Magazine hails from the Galway Language Centre and offers this eleventh edition from the work of its associated membership. There are 33 poets and writers featured here, many of which are connected with Ireland and Galway in particular, though the widespread net of this magazine takes in poets and writers from Australia, New Zealand and the USA.

Between the striking colour covers by Tom Mathews this issue contains almost 40 poems and 3 short stories (one in translation)

Sandra Bunting is concerned with change, not necessarily for the good in A WINO GOES BACK TO CABBAGETOWN

	Nice things happened here.
	Coins from passing strangers
	could buy time out of the cold
	in the Greek's greasy diner.

	the world of commerce followed
	the tavern went for houses.

	fronts full of flowers
	and foreign ornamental trees.
	But not mine anymore

	Mammoth bones, did I form you?
	...
	Did I create the world, code it and pack it?
	...
	If I see it first and name it, is it mine?

	Then I am the explorer of my own land:
	Rare and savage, with
	Scars of discovery already planned in my heart.

			now
	he texts her to say he thinks he left
	his life's work in the back of her car; and
	though the rabble-rouser she married
	vanished around 1975, he's still against
	poverty on Wednesdays
	...
			inside
	yesterday's perfect sculpted revolutionary
	was always today's paunchy liberal who slugs
	his cabernet, and watches daytime TV
	with an elderly Labrador named
	Adlai Stevenson, the Fourth.

	scrawls defiance on the blank of times's indifference,
	Graffiti on the walls of history.
	...
	An aging face, once beautiful,
	Stares through its own reflection,
	Soliciting an audience
	To dignify the commonplace as art?

I always found myself standing by the ghost train, watching and waiting, just as I promised. I couldn't forget ... And I would give anything to stop the nightmares, and feel my mother's hand, warm and sticky from candyfloss, tightly clutching my own, just one more time.

The title, Crannóg has several Irish meanings — a piece of wood, a frame, a pulpit, a lake dwelling and a crow's-nest. Perhaps the last meaning is apt, because in the second poem by Patricia Burke Brogan (of "Eclipsed" fame), LOBELIA IN NOVEMBER, we have

	The weather forecast
	for tonight
	is minus three
	in Bosnia Herzegovina.

	Outside the lonely boats, the restless waters, the night wanderers
	looking to the bleary light.
	Inside the bar-keep clearing wistful dregs.

	Outside the faltering signal,
	the forlorn rapping, the futile appeal.
	Inside the final say.

She leaned across the table towards Eilish.
"Well, as I was saying, when Aunt Brigie was knocked down by a car and taken to hospital, I was sent to collect her nightdresses and underwear. Hidden under her knickers were ironed copies of 'News of the World.'"
"How did she get them?" Eilish laughed.
"Her husband's a Customs and Excise Officer who confiscates dirty newspapers from English and German boats docked in Galway."

limbs floating free from a lifetime of modesty.

Another novel excerpt, by Kevin Donnelly, ASH WEDNESDAY, has enough shape to stand on its own. A paranoid old lady and a sympathetic librarian interact:

She put the paper back and took a book at random off the bookshelf and came back.
"Think I'm going crazy?"
That was a tough one .
"Strange," she said and left without my ever getting a chance to check out the book she was carrying. In the circumstances, I thought it best to just let her go.

Another cleverly wrapped-round situation is GREEN by Maureen Gallagher where a schoolboy wrestles with ignorance, jealousy and being precocious; an explosive mix:

Because my amygdala is more than likely switched off most of the time, I don't know for sure if Lauren likes me or not. When I think about relativity, space-time, and black holes I'm happy.

Back to the poems — HANDS by Zara Little-Campbell gives knitting, like poetry writing, an extra value

	Now, she wraps her woes in chunky wool,
	The needles — a dial to gauge her mood;
	Reflected in the tension that cries
	A thousand curses, lost — for now — from her mind.

	Then
	In a pub
	you read your poem.
	Tighten it up
	Tighten it up
	The crowd chant
	Lose the adjectives
	Well.aah.mmm.
	Red-faced you mumble

	On the day of the bomb
	we were playing at visitors.
	Padraig and Lydia, home from England
	were tourist-trailed around the Folk Park,
	bemusedly watching Spanish students
	chasing chickens round the half-door.
	Only Mary, who lived there,
	recognising the familiar reverberations
	said, that sounds like a bomb.

	Your world has balanced once again,
	And it's back to vegetable shopping, 
	Hanging out the washing.

Crannóg #14 is a collection of poetry and short stories; some writers with one or more poems. This volume has all the marks of a decent enterprise. There are 43 contributors. Most of the stories are bracingly to the point.

Susan Bunting in DRESSED AS A GODDESS, tells us briskly:

His one indulgence — going back to his days as a lecturer in Egyptology — was a small room, a cubicle really, where he displayed a few statues of Egyptian Goddesses: Nut, Blast, Isis. Although more aesthetic than valuable, they were not without worth. Contacts made during his research month had paid off and allowed him to purchase minor treasures on the museum's delicate budget.

But to get back to me for a minute. Although it was a winter's evening, I still had all the curtains open. I like to do that because, paradoxically, it deters the nosy-parker across the yard, who spends her time hanging out the window chain-smoking.

The bowl shivers with water. Sometimes the water is green and sometimes it is brown, or ablaze with the beaten gold and silver of the sun and moon.

Most of the poems in this collection strike the ear with a deliberate diction. There is something attractive in the volume's precocious naivety, and in the best poems, where a freer syntax allows the language to breathe, an aroma of freshness which plays through the words and gives them a particular idiosyncratic grace. Crannóg 14 represents, not so much an expedition into new territories as a settling into areas already mapped.

WILD FLOWERS, by Sean Donegan is laden with charm. It exudes the smell of flowers — his recollection,

	I will search near tree stumps for the shy lily of the valley,
	greedily inhaling its sweet and heady fragrance

	This Spring I will no longer pick wild flowers;
	every vase filled with the memory only of last year's profusion"

In Patricia Burke Brogan's FAL DAN I (2) the persona, gazes with reflective eyes on her suburban garden, its multi-colour reminding her of poets whose work she admires:

	beneath the earth,
	a mirror-image hedge,
	dark life of meshed roots,
	in multi-cultured richnesses,
	draws word-colours
	from Pushkin, Akhmatova
	Amergin, Eibhlin Dubh,
	Seamus Dall and Aodhagain.

	Feadog
 
	In the blackened field,
	Light whistles the windowed house
	Back from the brink

	Dolores Stewart

		Swallows, welcome back!
		Last year's nest is still filthy,
		just as you left it

		Mary Redfern
	
	Foliage withering
	Crisp on the newly-mown lawn
	Dance at harvest-time

	Mary O'Rourke

	My last thoughts of you
	Perched like some tiny god of
	The en-suite bathroom shaving light 
	Was
	'Fuck me, that's a twenty foot drop pet —'.

	"Even if it's all been done before,
	we yell when Emer takes the floor".

	Ultramarine, beyond the sea,
	Is Trenet, Darren, Sinatra waiting for me with my tie unstrung.

		the handsome
	US commando, the leader of the pack

	. . . Showtime in Haditha.  Red
	rage unfurling into young and old, packed
	in, bunkered.  Some collateral damage.  War.

	. . . appears, disappears,
	Without so much as a nod,
	Leaving my clammy hands to cool
	In the evening breeze,
	Into one of two hundred,
	More or less, identical
	Green doors.

The connection between love and poetry is not as obvious as it appears and resides in the language itself, as we see in the poems of Susan Millar DuMars and Pauline Murphy. The real place of connection between poetry and love, and the real concern of the lyric poet operates as a subversive force against the legislative operations of language itself. The poem is the place of risk: the poet is daring the possibility of effacement by refusing the given meanings of language and, worse still, is at the mercy of the poem itself. Poets such as Breid Sibley, Jarlath Fahy and Gavan Duffy spiral around themselves in an exchange of energy, which inspires ever increasing arousal. It is easy to see this in the sensuousness of IN FUTURE, by Gavan Duffy:

	I would succumb in public, a short
	Desperate little drama.  Onlookers would watch
	Each other to see who would take responsibility
	Angry at my
	Putting them in that position
	Vowing to live in the moment
	And to stop missing what they had
	Never had.

	at the slobberers convention
	its ok to be a fool
	fall on your faces flat
	trip on your laces own
	be tied tongued
	get out of bed side wrong
	two legs left
	thumbs all