NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

Fifty-nine poems (plus snippets and illustrations) luxuriate in seventy-seven pages. Like an expensive sofa, THE SHOp (yes, that's its format) gives comfortable white space round each poem. The magazine, measured, is not quite square, but feels like it. You are relaxed before you start to read. This is just as well because the writing included merits close attention. House style —- mostly no capitals on left margin (hooray!); not many quips or one-line epigrams (also, hooray!). Here is Lidija Simkute giving the recipe in THE SPACE:

	The space
	in between

	gives the words
	their sound

	'Wasn't Maggie Deegan related to the Nealons?'
	quizzes Tadghg. 'She was, and Brennans in Clooncraff'.
	Terry Watchorne comes in. 'How's Terry.
	'A pint Terry?' Climbing off the stool,
	over to the tap, lifting her arm, she says
	'Wasn't that awful about Kate Nealon'.

	This sparrow-fierce morning, bright
	as the splintering sea...
	..the whole sea-and-soil world,.
	. ....wind-tugged scalps of grass..
	..dark garnets of hail...
	...thousand-year grief of the gale.

 
	Crows had been circling for days,
	With their chalk board tunes and ill-faith ways.
	The lamenters gather around the newly solemn pit.
	Dew clings futilely to blackened walls unlit.

		.. woken from somnambulant pissing—
	finished to silence, the lid replaced and the shake
	of two steps, the hush of the quilt round you
	and the isolation returned to me in my narrow bed.

	actions ordered, then denied; we wait
	for progress to prove genocide, for weather
	to bring us new conversations
	and masks

	to cover our blushing cheeks...
	. alibis for something that
	never happened.

	Socially, we are tremendous.
	If it is friendship you are after
	we will come tumbling up to you.
	In Donegal, Gaelic is our language
	With its humps, its shadows it is like Ourselves.
	You go up a mountain and down the other side
	to find out how you are.