NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

This slim booklet is the winner of the 2004 Open Poetry Monthly Booklet Competition. Its author, Derek Adams, has had his work published in a number of small press magazines.

POSTCARDS TO OLYMPUS accompanies Orpheus of Greek mythology to the Greek islands, returns to roller blade with him in New York's Central Park and in the final poem ORPHEUS IN L.A. cruises Hollywood and Vine with him. Many of the poems bear in their titles the name of Greek heroes, such as Tethys, Ganymedes and Hector.

The booklet begins with the poem ORPHEUS, in which the hero tells us that,

	The music does it every time —

	must have been mad with passion.

	Busking in Central Park.
	a crowd gathers, even

 	a Rollerblader stops
	removes her Walkman to listen,

 	and above the treetops;
	sky scrapers lean forward.

	once dreamt of touching the stars

	Falling through the sky

	In the corner,
	this tiny Gorgon,
	the eight legs snaking.

The poem that perhaps best encapsulates the strengths of Adams is based on the Classical myth of Oedipus, where the viewpoint twists, the speaker strains after recognition, wonders

	did you expect me to be any different?

	Did I ever really know you?
	Perhaps fleetingly at the end
	our separate paths met.
	I could hardly recognise you lying there;
	the years had taken their toll:
	still in your eyes
	an unanswered riddle.

	the blurring headlights and neon
	absorb your likeness back into the underworld.

	brought warmth
	to my lips
	in the cold
	of the long night.

This is a work of power, originality and individuality. The poems are short — one to a page. Poetical devices such as rhyme are eschewed, but the poems retain rhythm, and imagery. The effect is a series of poems relating a story of one man's journey to find happiness using the mythological story of Orpheus to underpin it and retell it in a modern way. The central concern of the poems being the notion that nothing really changes.

Adams' 52 poems of his first full collection are certainly a miscellany in subject matter; all poems should gel for the reader; some have an alluring twist of meaning at the end; some dissolve to present another perspective at the end; others emphasize by repetition. The genre varies, though probably one can say that there is no direction of thought to wide issues of humanity. The poet reacts to situations with complete absence of ego or self-importance. Work I liked included SKRYING which commences

	If I stare long enough into the polished black obsidian mirror
	they will come to me
	the angels or demons.

	If I look too long into your eyes,
	they will come to me
	the angels or demons.

	In the ordinariness of this routine,
	two things puzzle me:
	why is this book
	(whose black letters pose
	mysteriously on the open page)
	made of stone
	and why does Michael
	want to sleep here?

On the whole a collection of undemanding and interesting reading, maybe somewhat overpriced.

23 poems exploring the life and works of the American surrealist artist, Man Ray. The opening poem, MAN RAY, deals with Man Ray's creation or putting together of his cultural identity, as well as his own name, and the multifarious facets and interplay of his various art-forms:

	His own name an assemblage, even.
	Man; reinvented.
	Ray; dazzling, vibrant.

	And the metronome swings
	Dada Dada
	Filmmaker — Poet
	Dada Dada

	Eye a lens,
	focusing sharply on an object —
	showing us something other.

	I rise slowly, sit in front of the mirror,
	take a piece of paper, a pencil,
	start to re-draw myself.
	Man Ray. Man Ray. Man Ray.

Luckily we are provided with a biographical and culturally-significant list of dates, with brief explanations, at the end of the sequence of poems. For example, we are told that in 1913 Man Ray visited the Armoury Show in New Jersey and discovered European avant-garde; consequently Derek Adams' piece, THE ARMOURY SHOW 1913, becomes self-explanatory:

	  I have seen it,
	    I have seen it, here.
	            The future.
	       Here in this hall,
	          brazen as anything
	      it walks down the stairs
	   toward me, naked.

	Throw away the old brushes,
	the old ideas, the old order.
	Dada. Dada. Dada.

	Paris chases her tail like a street mutt,
	bites, barks, jumps
	round the place de la Concorde,
	shits 22 carat faeces on the sidewalk.

The art-forms and artistic preoccupations of the 1920s hold Derek Adams in a trance, and through his skilful interweaving of Man Ray's life and works with poems themselves constructed in terms of shifting focus, interchangeability of perspective and ever-evolving contrasts we are led into his fascination with this epoch. For example, the eroticism of the 1920s, especially in terms of the sexually outrageous, but essentially sexist images of women, is celebrated in KIKI DE MONTPARNASSE:

	Blanc et Noir
	mask and face
	face and mask
	Black and white

	What is artificial.
	What is art.

	Painted lips, cheeks
	hand drawn eyebrows,
	mascara lashes.
	These are not glass tears.