NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

A collection of 40-odd poems, divided into five sections. Opening poems reveal the poet's love of Scotland and its spirit and history, as in JOURNEY FROM SCOTLAND:

	Mist battled hummocks and the train's sure speed
	play tricks — wraiths duelling on debated ground,
	wind sounds swords singing, old sagas are freed,
	dead warriors make air skirl for miles around.

	Listen, winds harry her bad songs,
	heather chafes with them,
	boxing hares form stresses.
	Sleet slings refrains, stings
	greet your wintering cheek.

	Ancestors are breath on window panes —
	a few survive in photographs,
	are ferns leaning toward haloed light.

			This is the letter where I tell you
	how strong your girls were, who grew knowing you
	as a photograph's coal-eyed stranger,
	or empty blazer hanging between winter coats.

	Carefully sliced, as if she was
	first knife-bite in a wartime wedding-cake.
	Exiled by an angry mother
	on behalf of a jilted son.

	Still I see him, standing hand in pocket,
	as if Mansfield was glamorous Palm Springs
	and not a place to make his spirits dive.
 
	I keep him like a picture in a locket.

	Tsuu T'ina people caught on camera,
	age-spotted like the flattened backs of hands,
	proud riders stare from yellowing grasslands
	where falcons repeat like a stammerer.

	Maybe they knew me best who danced for rain, for harvest,
	who were named from my fauna — Crazy Horse, Spotted Tail,
	Sitting Bull, Little Raven, maybe I knew them best
	whose blood fed me as it should not have done,
	they ghost dance on me still.

	Exotic parrot on a plain, dun perch
	she's trying costume-jewellery, see her lurch
	before the mirror, jade-beads swinging.

	And when it drizzles, I think of sitting next to Kavanagh's
	bronze double, wiry bones welded to canal-bench.
	No flayed cuff-ends or split pockets but vein-
	branched trousers, exposed gristle,
	his cross-legged presence right in rain.
	Eric Morecambe spec frames
	dripping.

THE BARDS # 18 is a series designed to showcase the work of individual poets. The slim booklet under review is Deborah Tyler-Bennett's PULP FICTION COUPLE: VINCE & LOLA.

Tyler-Bennett has had a distinguished career so far in her writing. She is a poet, short fiction writer, and illustrator with over 300 poems published in journals and anthologies. A collection of her poems, CLARK GABLE IN MANSFIELD, was published in 2003 and she is working on a second collection.

Flick through Tyler-Bennett's PULP FICTION COUPLE: VINCE AND LOLA, and be arrested by her words. Very serious work, this, but otherwise filled with wonder, like WREN'S WREATH and THE MAN WHO IS NOTHING. Her poems are fresh and interesting. Tyler-Bennett is the kind of writer who takes a vaguely interesting subject and turns it round and round, finding her own angle.

In WREN'S WREATH, for example, the central subject is the wren with its

	Clarion call, glass-boned body,
	darting, dabbing oak-leaf,
	hedgerow ruling chieftain.

	Come today, or not at all,
	today, or not at all . . .

In THE MAN WHO IS NOTHING, Tyler-Bennett draws a picture of a man who moves through life seemingly meaning nothing to anyone with whom he comes in contact. A strange encounter takes place in which people look past him into the next room, a feeling that matches the inner turmoil over his delusion that he could ever be part of life.

	You say you see me
	but how come you look straight past
	my shoulder to the next room?

	Table-tops swim with low candle flame,
	Made votive by tea-lights.  Only us 
	in here.  Coffee-matic whine and buzz.

The last poem in this pamphlet is COUNTING HAGS UNDER A COLD MOON. The poem deals with Europe's hags, which the poet names as Black Annis, Callieac Bheur, Berchta, Cally Berry, and others. Here she captures the essence of myth. What impels her? Is it admiration or fear? The following quote is taken from the section entitled AUNT ARIE, BEFANA, MOTHER HOLLE.

	Grandmother glimpses Befana,
	hustles toddlers indoors
	before live coals, scatter
	from crone's hem.

	Silently, hags traverse towns,
	cities . . .  Big freeze in their wake,
	milky land locked,
	candles lit in front of shops.