NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

Selima Hill once wrote, "all poetry is love poetry". Love is after all a bigger, darker and more complex word than romance , and Hill was trying to get at the important point that 'love poetry' is a rather stupid generic term; it demeans the word love to a kind of schmaltzy Valentine's Day card type of affair, and the word poetry for that matter. All poetry is about love, the absence of love, the need for love, the ridiculousness of love and the ever onward search for love.

So when Hill comes to write a book of 100 short selfstyled 'love poems' we can expect no Valentine's day card fodder, no 'roses are red, violets are blue' here. Language, domesticity and desire all collide in this alphabet of incantations, an A-Z of poetic spells in which Hill transforms her lover with a shake of her pen into anything from a 'Handbag' to a 'Servant', an 'Upmarket Snack' to a 'Waterbeetle' and the outcomes range from the sublime to the surreal. A hundred metaphors for the one human condition

Hill's lover is a figure of fun and a focus for spite and malice as much as he is an object of desire and longing. Often enough though these compact poems are so startling and strange we feel more than one of these emotions working at once, defying any clear explanation or finite meaning.

PORTRAIT OF MY LOVER AS A NEWT like many of the poems is just made up of a single metaphor, but it is a sign of Hill's poetic skill that she still manages to transmogrify a kiss between lovers into such a shocking, abrupt and strange image in only four lines

	Your tongue inside my mouth
	is like a newt
	beside the penis
	of a small baby

	temples like a gun

MY LOVER AS A GOAT, is a dig in the ribs against an insensitive suitor,

	you act as if there's no such thing as Ovaltine
	no such thing as wanting to be held.

	eaten by moonlight

PORTRAIT OF MY LOVER AS A WASHING MACHINE:

	Get white;
	cat sheets;
	and with your rubber throat
	roar, 0 Lord
	for daring to be mine

In fact there is a pattern throughout the collection of using the domestic landscape, the vocabulary of many women's day to day existence, as an important tool. Just as Linda Sterling juxtaposed irons, and ironing boards with women's bodies in her montages during the 1970s, Hill uses this landscape of household objects to dramatise a woman's voice in this collection.

It's as if Hill sees the love lyric, the epitomical cliché of poetical history, as an exhausted and deflated idiom, one she can only hope to make work by mocking it, turning inside out at will and letting it dangle off her pen playfully. PORTRAIT OF MY LOVER AS A KITCHENETTE is a case in point:

	I would like to be married, O Lord
	to a kitchenette 
	whose overstated but misleading radiance 
	belies the fact
	it's easy to maintain.

From the gentle humour of PORTRAIT OF MY LOVER AS A FLOWER ARRANGEMENT:

	so stiff
	so in the way

There is something uplifting about the ending poems of PORTRAIT OF MY LOVER AS A HORSE though. In PORTRAIT OF MY LOVER AS MY EX-LOVER the willing vulnerability of the

	I have fallen in love, O Lord
	Wish well

All in all this carnival of moments, collection of spellbinding epiphanies, where lovers turn into Zebras and Motorways, where the fluff in a pocket is closer to god than an Angel, where Hill laughs at men, despises, mocks, humiliates and needs them is a mesmerizing book of poetry, which gets richer with every read