Apologies for cross posting.

The Journal, edited by Catherine Walsh and Billy Mills, 62 pages, IR£6.00,
hardPressed Poetry, 1998, 37 Grosvenor Court, Templevill Road, Templeogue,
Dublin 6W, Eire

This is the first edition of what may be the only magazine in Ireland
devoted to what might be called alternative poetry. 

Featured in this issue Maurice Scully, Tom Raworth, Geoffrey Squires, Brian
Coffey and Catherine Walsh.

Scully's contribution begins with a piece  titled THE RED NOTEBOOK  which
shifts from Ireland to Africa, from prose blocks to short-lined breath
pockets, from spiritual exercises to how to make Robin Hood hats from an
old envelope.  His take on the Irish lit scene is tersely  sketched:

"I mean: everything run through this tensely amalgamated
shadow-corps so that so many young practitioners
don't even know how much's been filtered out or that
anything has been <It>erase/erase<It> in the first place"

There is the moment to moment notation:

"
& then footsteps
& the gate
& then another door closing
& then footsteps
& the gate
& footsteps"

Humour, attentiveness, delicacy and bile.

"straining, eager,
academic notetaker,
sensitive earpiece,
intrepid sticker,
lump of ice -
but, still unimpressed,
<It>get me out of here<It>

His second piece: THE DUN COPY begins with a table facing a window and
opens out to span an urban landscape, a painting by Klee (noting that the
time given by a clocktower in said painting is twenty to twelve: "the angle
/ appropriate to this degree of paradise" i.e. not the happy faced ten to
two so popular with jewellery shops), birds, trees and entomology. 
Learning with a light touch, and set not in stone but in straitened
circumstances.

Tom Raworth's piece is a thirteen line poem NO MUSIC a housewarming present
from a poet who has consistently supported the handful of writers in
Ireland.

"to rise steadily with reduction
was the theme revealed 
outside a circle of suburbs"

Geoffrey Squires is represented by POEM FOR TWO VOICES, a version of a text
previously published as THIS and which he and Romana Huk read at the
Assembling Alternatives conference in New Hampshire in 1996.

The first voice describes concrete experiences, out there, 

"Haze of sound   indirection   the hum of insects on all sides   
everywhere this world is all around"

While the second voice seems to insist that there is only perception:

"<It>Light or hearing_<It>"

and

"<It> All this is thought    all this is what is thought <It>"

The first voice, piling up detail, using metaphor, rhythm, whatever devices
it can, presses closer and closer on the world, while the second continues
to remind us of "<It> some part not reached not touched <It>.  Then, as the
poem develops a change takes over both voices, perception and landscape
involving each other, the second voice swelling as it is touched by
experience, the first voice contracting as it learns doubt.

Two extracts from Brian Coffey's Advent follow, embodying a type-code
version of some pencilled notes made by the author.  That is, Coffey had
written musical type notations involving slashes and marks on two sections
of the poem.  Billy Mills then retyped this for the Journal using the
symbols "/" and "^^^^" as found on a keyboard. The result is published here
and may be of interest to readers and scholars of Coffey. One might wonder
however why Mills didn't just scan in the original and print that.

The final section contains a sizeable extract from Catherine Walsh's CITY
WEST.  

Difficult to quote in a way that e-mail won't entirely mangle. Walsh's
layout allows for groups of words to find themselves to the side of the
main text, where one can read across or down or whatever, as in the real
thing no direction given.

There are some transliterations of street conversations:

"hey you how woz?

yo!      hi ya       wanna
ha've

ho,       ho yeah
he?       he,    he wanna be her

how 'y?                                      a yeah rih

yo!        geh da wan               ha ha"

Multi-barbed declaratives:

"                       At this stage

possession                                 was everything

                    
                           no regard
                                  to         gathering                    
historical
                       information"

And throughout even the most fractured passages a sense of submerged
articulation which may be apprehended in varying degrees. It's up to you,
but it's there if you want it. Or even if you don't. Not to mention a
freshness of observation which is the opposite of display. And the lovely
sounds Walsh's poem makes in the air.

Two reviews, one by Matthew Geden, one by J.C.C. Mays (another long-time
supporter of the writers found here) conclude the magazine.

It's great to see hardPressed,, which published 18 titles of front line
poetry in the eighties, up and at it again.  The Journal's policy of
awarding 15 to 20 pages to each poet is exactly what is required for these
writers whose unit is the book and who do not do well in confined spaces. 
Tús maith! Long may it continue.

Randolph Healy
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