I purchased the first issue of this slim annual late in the year. I had been hearing a lot of buzz about Heliotrope and finally got a chance to see what all the hype was about.
Heliotrope: A Journal of Poetry certainly lived up to its hype. Published out of Shady, New York, Heliotrope has an impressive advisory board (including Stephen Dunn, Carol Muske and Galway Kinnell) as well as an exciting selection of poets.
The poems in this journal are all subtly powerful. They don't shout at you or mock you. Even when they're having fun, they retain a high mark of craftsmanship, as in "The Lawyer Visits the Zoo" by Ruth Anderson Barnett:
The cheetah paces from shade
to filtered light and back again,
flicker of fur, flicker of iron. Sun
slipping through trees, the lawyer nods,
she dreams of pulling the books down,
finding a loophole, striding
before a mahogany judge -- prosecution,
defense, defendant, all three,
she cracks her whip (the courtroom's
leaping through hoops), then vanishes
in a flash of magic
Although the poems in the journal seem to have a unified "feel" or "mood," they certainly are not all similar in style. While some of the poems have long, lyrical lines, others are tight and spare, such as "Brigit's Day" by Margaret Ryan:
Bare lilac. Quartered
cherry. Red in the
barberry. Groundhog's
Day. Or Brigit's Day.
No Matter. Winter
thralls earth a little
longer. Birches freeze
and shiver. Rivers
melt, silver.
The simple line drawing on an unassuming gray card-stock cover gives no hint of the gems that await you inside Heliotrope, once again proving you can't judge a book by its cover.
