NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

An independent small press poetry review

NHI independent review
IVAN SCHNEEDORFER: THE HORIZON IS FAR AWAY
Shoreline Press
23 Ste-Anne
Ste-Anne-de-Bellvue
Quebec
H9X 1L1
Canada
ISBN 1 896754 46 5
$12.95
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This page last updated: 10th December 2007. 		IVAN SCHNEEDORFER: THE HORIZON IS FAR AWAY

These untitled works are headed with consecutive numbers and are handily placed one to a page. The author is approaching his 70th year.

Ivan Schneedorfer was born in Czechoslovakia in 1937 and moved to Canada in 1968. Today he lives in Tsawwassen, a coastal town near Vancouver.

Poem number 1 gives a flavour of what's on his mind:

	yes
	my life is
	like an apple 

	from which
	i peel
	the past
From one who
has written poems all his life, and has six published books.
albeit written in Czech plus one bilingual publication THE SILENCE AFTER MUSIC in English/French I had expected something more imaginative in poem number 1 than
	my life is
	like an apple
We live after all in an age when an onion is a poetic metaphor for love. But then maybe a Granny Smith is quaintly old fashioned; it has a meaning for the septuagenarian readership; a link to the past.

Much in this volume, with its falling skittle cover painting by Vlastimil Janicek, is strangely sublime. Take poem 46 for example. It's here in full:

	the gentleman
	is fascinated

	he is
	gently 
	elevated

	he is 
	sitting
	in my chair

	with
	his head in 
	another room
In several of his poems Schneedorfer asks himself a question and then proceeds to answer it. Poem 12 is an example of the form. Here it is:
	what do
	we see
	around us?

	the computerised 
	world!

	we are not 
	amused

	neither is 
	the Lord.
Schneedorfer comes up with some curious ideas. In poem 24 he writes:
	i should
	spend more 
	time with books

	i should 
	make more 
	love to them
There are 60 poems in here and I must admit that I thoroughly enjoyed well over half of them. The ones I've culled hopefully give an impression of the nuances, reflections and observations to be found throughout the collection.

In poem 5, previously published in the DELTA ANTHOLOGY OF PROSE AND POETRY 2002 Schneedorfer writes:

	lucky me

	...
          
	i'm 
	invisible 

	i'm 
	wearing
	sunglasses
The portrait photo on the back cover confirms this impression. After reading this entertaining book I had the idea that I'd spent an hour or two listening to the ramblings of an old comrade at his hearth with perhaps a bottle of something between us. A couple of stray typos failed to spoil our fun.

I suspect that Ivan Schneedorfer will be entertaining us for a couple of decades to come. As he says of himself in poem 49:

	by the time
	my bus 
	gets home

	i'll be old
	as Methuselah

reviewer: Gwilym Williams.