NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

VORTEX is John Sexton's third collection of poetry. Here are poems that carefully dissect the careless cruelty of life, in the case of BUTCHER'S DAUGHTER, its unrequited love under the scalpel:

	Next you display some hearts
	under a glass window.
	The smallest of which,
	on the left hand corner,
	is mine.

	I will wait here till water swallows me,
	the river bursts and rises to Heaven;
	till the moon's a hook from which hangs my heart.

	(xii)

	Night lasts forever,
	and the snow is white in the darkness.
	I am the eternal moment of the nightingale.

	the house was gone 
	and I could see you 
	pushing it down the street 
	on castors.

	he erected a tall fence made from sheets of corrugated iron.
	You'll see no angels now, he said.

	I can see a half circle of children, emaciated, their faces miserable.
	Some are visibly retarded, others invisibly so,
	but I can see what they are, know what they are,
	have the space inside me that they fit.

The trinity of artists involved in SHADOWS BLOOM, a Doghouse imprint of haiku, come together very neatly, affirming Sexton's introductory words that the three texts

are three separate visions of the same environment.

As Sexton studied the haiku form and came into contact with Gabriel Rosenstock, he learned a new kind of freedom with the form:

that meditative instant of perception in which the poem itself is formed.

For inspiration Sexton naturally uses his environment: that of the world around him and for the most part it is the natural world, the three dimensional world of sight, sounds and smell that invest his vision of nature with significance. Like any poet Sexton searches for the new way of conveying meaning, taking the moon, the stars, crows and jackdaws cats and foxes and the earth as some points of reference in his outlook.

The collection begins with:

	missing an ear
		and still smiling
		moon

Sexton's relationship with crows dotted across the whole collection reminds the reader of Ted Hughes CROW collection, but it is Sexton's faithful observance, admiration and yet detachment from them which allows an amusement at their antics:

	a good game
	but shadows of crows
	are too fast to catch

	crows calling more
	more
	sky darkens

	the stars keep their place
	a fox barks
	in the darkness

	on her back in wet grass
	eyes shut to grey sky
	the abandoned doll

	bitter wind — 
	warm your fingers 
	over these daffodils

	busy in the garden of my fingertip the ant

	daffodils rot
	in the vase
	their shadows bloom

Sexton's experiments with using haiku as separate stanzas in longer pieces, are attached as appendices, but bear close reading too as works in their own right. Appendix C, ISSA IN THE GOLDEN CORRIDOR, uses thirteen successive haiku as a descriptive narrative to illustrate the dream sequence of Issa. Appendix F, WORK OF THE HEART, uses more surreal imagery to convey the sense of work, seeming as a metaphor for something larger in the sum of the haiku:

	in his workshop—
	the heartmaker sews a new heart
	snails smear the window