NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

The quote from John Banville that opens this collection says in part,

Cities exert a strong, strange fascination, and none is stranger or stronger than the pull of Prague

IN PRAGUE is a handsomely produced chapbook with brilliant yellow cover and simple black artwork. Passing, as it does, away from the spine of the book, the artwork appears to be beckoning the reader to follow its path into the poems inside the covers.

A passion to preserve the past emanates from Tallack's writing. And, in the knowledge of events that follow, reading these poems with their stark images can have an unexpected poignancy, for example the opening poem INTRODUCTION contains these observations of going back in time, spending a year trying to capture the past and recollect the history of the city of Prague:

	Looking back to a beginning
	From somewhere beyond an end
	A dense flatness is visible.
	Through the turning and grinding of time
	An untraceable line is traced
	Between past and more past,
	Drawing together
	Season with season,
	Winter with winter.

	I shivered my way through various introductions.
	Hands are shaken
	Fingers, limp with cold
	Press against the frost wrinkled glass.

	What would you call it?  Love?
	You wouldn't dare, would you?
	You whose heart was being pulled
	By strings wound tightly round another's fist.

NARODNI TRIDA captures a time when trams rumbled

	through straight-line streets

	Ring out across the years —
	'18, '68, '89, and all that
	They say.

In the section Summer, the season is nicely evoked in PRUHONICE:

	A shower of colour
	Sprinkled on early summer
	Where water doubles the world.

	Heat trickled like blood
	Through the swollen veins
	Of those blazing days.

	I lost us in comfortable trees
	Where two deer escaped
	Our cautious approach.

VYSEHRAD II brings us to autumn. The irony between the "Quiet cemetery walks" and the families who have spent their wealth, seems to imply that ordinary life continues in spite of greater events. Money may now be gone but other things retain their value such as the beauty of the autumn leaves:

	Scattered leaves,
	Leaves in piles,
	Leaves drifting from tree
	To littered ground
	Where feet scuff through golden crackles
	And toe-steps crumble
	Into autumn sounds.

	The trees reach upwards
	Towards the crumbling facades

	the haze-drawn stretch
	Of city dawn

Returning to winter in the poem MALA STRANA, Tallack takes "one final walk". Here the speaker recounts how tourists now march through the streets — "My streets", as the poet calls them:

	As the giant metronome
	Aching with age and purpose
	Draws time through frigid air
	Where Stalin used to stand,
	I wait my turn like everyone else.

	It is here that two journeys collide.
	One, straightforward and slow
	Is relentless in its movement:
	Solid and unforgiving as glacier ice.

	The other leads me backwards,
	A more intricate and twisted pathway
	Still littered with glass
	And fragile glimpses of love.

	As distance stretches out
	Pulling tightly against this molten core
	The star points of history
	Bullet-holed against the black night
	Contract
	All vacuums are filled
	All details lost
	To the vast censorship of time
	And the cruelty of memory. 

This is writing with a purpose. Its subject may be weighty, but is never weighed down by it. The interest in the collection lies in its view that life, though never wholly comprehensible, is always interesting and worth revisiting.