One of the first things in the magazine is a letter to the editor from someone claiming the literary elite is anti-American, and going on to refer to a century of sacrifice by America which saved the world from“Marxist or fascist darkness.” Peace in Europe continues because of the presence of US troops (nothing to do with the EU then, or painful memories of war). It’s hard to know whether this letter is from a disgruntled writer who had his work rejected, is a piss take on certain types of right-wing American thinking, or is even just invented for this issue of the magazine. The author, Bill from California, goes on to say, “I know what it means that you don’t allow a single dissenting voice, and I will have nothing to do with it. Do not publish any of my literature.” Real or fictional, this letter is the perfect introduction to issue 3 of Versal.

Christina Marie Mengert’s ‘On Romance’ is the first of the poems. Using different, even clashing imagery, the poem nevertheless has a wonderful lyricism. I could take issue with the odd phrase and line. “As if it were not enough to mourn / and to arrange, flies swim at us / like harpoons and like elephants / with harpoons.” The sentence could have been simplified, ending after the first harpoons, or substituting the elephant version rather than having both. But others might feel differently, and this is still a good poem and it trips off the tongue like a song. Mengert is a poet I’d like to see more of.

Very short prose pieces and prose poems are a feature of this magazine. ‘The Blue Route’ by Ellen Wehle is a beautifully simple piece of writing with some lovely images and lines:“Stars hot as spilled rocket fuel.” Her poem, ‘Because Joe Said I Want to See the City that You're From’ is also memorable, with a dark undercurrent appearing when the narrator remembers the date who once mused on how he could dump her body at the edge of a field and no one would ever know. This dark detail is dropped into a piece that otherwise follows her with her husband on a trip, but the memory of that old boyfriend haunts the ending. Lines that stood out include we “gather up our sunglasses, / our soda cans, and walk out / into our snapshots. / Drunken honeybees in a flowerbed / bumbling with pleasure.”

’Evolution’ by Ryan G Van Cleave is a poem that can be read in two ways. Lines are crossed out. Without those lines, the poem is lyrical: a simple description of Charles Darwin sitting on a ship with his notebook. It becomes a different poem with the other lines included: “the ocean a cliché behind him, wet / metaphors that flirt by lifting froth white / skirts.” Part of the title too has been crossed out, and its full form reads: ‘Charles Darwin Reconsidering His Theory of Evolution.’ This was one of my favourite poems in the magazine.

The short story ‘Harper and Brandon’ by Rhonda Waterfall follows the breakup of a marriage. The couple meet to decide on the fate of their possessions, but soon they are at loggerheads, and each begin to vomit up various items: feathers, blond hair, coal (thrown up by Harper and taken by Brandon as evidence that she is hard inside), a toy soldier (Brandon is still basically a little boy.) There is a nice ending to this one: “In her hand was a crumpled picture of the first boy who ever left her.” This story skims the surface rather than digging deep. The paragraphs could have done with being broken up more. There was some nice tongue-in-cheek humour at the beginning though, relating to toothpaste and how to load a dishwasher.

’The United States is Not The World’ is a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye. Bill from California ought to take a look at this one. The narrator tells us, “Donald Rumsden’s in Delhi today. / I’d like to tie him to Gandhi’s bed / for four years and I’d say this anywhere.”If I was to make a criticism of this poem at all, it’s that the third stanza could have been trimmed a little. The first two stanzas are particularly good. Poems by Sylvia Hubers and David Swann are presented in Dutch and English, and it’s nice to see that language link with the magazine’s home base.

One of my favourite bits of Versal is Ditsy Chicky’s Social Climax, a regular column. This time she details a disastrous dinner party and its aftermath in her usual hilarious style. Forget Sunday Supplement columnists and their vacuous scribblings about dinner parties where wine labels and this-season’s-must-have-menu are dropped in oh-so casually. If only those writers would choke on their expensive wine, their linguini, and their children’s fashionable names. Then people like Ditsy Chicky could replace them.

Assistant editor, Kate Foley, also returns in this issue with a non-fiction piece reflecting on her experience of being an Englishwoman living in Amsterdam. ‘How Fragments Fall’ is well-written and thoughtful, one of the stronger of the longer prose pieces in the magazine. In fact, most of the prose in issue 3 is short, usually less than a page. Because much of it is also poetic, it seems to occupy a place between poetry and prose. But there’s also experimental writing in here. ‘Clock’ by Sandy Florian is an interesting one, but again it is fairly short, though the length is exactly right. Kathe Gray’s ‘Bark’ is a longer story, and one of the best - quiet, thoughtful, and understated.

Returning to the poetry, ‘Diogenes has Shown’ by Omar Pérez is wonderfully lyrical and fluid. ‘Dangling’ by Larissa Andrusyshyn just flows from line to line and circles back on itself. It’s almost a stream-of-consciousness.

A theme that comes up several times in the magazine is that of the US administration’s recent and current foreign policy, particularly with regard to the war. ‘Orders of Identification’ by Marc Pietrzykowski is divided into two parts: ‘The World Sees USA’ and ‘USA Sees The World’. There are many great lines in these two poems. In ‘The World Sees USA’: “Ethnic slurs and cartoon balloons were / Clever as Sammy got, / And his heart was made from a big bass drum / That marched us, day after day / Down into the goddamned dirt…” It continues later, “Someone made him boss and loosed him on us. / Half-witted, gospel drunk, built to drone…” The second poem is suitably insular, looking inwards, set inside the USA, where life seems to go on, and the young pursue one another in language first romantic and then ironic “true love’s known to fade / When to their panties girls devoutly cling”. But an internment camp is close by, where the boys who have earlier pursued girls with golden hair now throw bottles over the fence, at “the A-rabs.” By morning, though, “boils, immense / And leaking, will have colonized every face.” This is a particularly strong work. Perhaps no one criticises the US quite as well as its own citizens, at least those willing to dissent.

Marilyn Hacker is another of the dissenters, as her poem ‘Letter To Hayden Carruth’ reveals. She tells us “our homespun junta exports the war machine. / They, too, have daily prayer meetings.” Later, she notes, “‘Our’ loss is grave: American, sacralized. / We are dismayed that dead Palestinians, / Kashmiris, Chechens, Guatemalans, / also are mourned with demands for vengeance.” She says she’d rather live in France or anywhere newspapers engage in literate debate. “I know where I feel more like a foreigner / now that it seems my birth country silences / dissent with fear.”

In terms of the artwork in issue three, there’s a lot of drawings, fewer paintings or photographs. ‘June ’n’ Edgar’ by Mirabai de Monchy Lacazette focuses on her interest in carnal indulgences. A woman pulls off her top to reveal a tattooed torso, while an older man, minus his trousers, looks on. ‘Me Walk You’ is another of her works, featuring a shoe being walked by its owner. Her ‘Abu Ghraib’ on the other hand has a very different subject: a soldier, possibly a woman, saluting. Among the other notable artworks is a lovely painted triptych, ‘Ami’ by Marc Swinkels, done in acrylic and oil on panel. It features a blue car, buried in foliage, as though dumped somewhere, and forgotten. Great to see the artists’ bios included this time too, especially since some of them have work exhibited on websites.

Versal 3 packs a punch, but does so with a velvet glove of beautiful and lyrical poetry. There’s a definite edge to the work in this issue that was less present in the previous one. In issue 3, Versal meets its aspirations to be an international collective, urgent and involved. This is a first class magazine and comes highly recommended. The only real criticism relates to the absence of longer fiction pieces, but the quality of the poetry and the short prose amply makes up for this. With its high production values, Versal is a pleasure to hold and leaf through, and deserves a place on any bookcase.

Kara Kellar Bell is a film and media graduate from the West of Scotland, with a passion for European novels, French films, silent cinema, and Brazilian music (everything from Daniela Mercury and other pop stars through to bossa nova). As a writer, she likes to have room to move around creatively, so she’s not located in one genre. She writes realism and also stories of a more fantastic nature, usually grounded to some extent in the real world. She also takes delight in writing across the sexual spectrum, and as a bisexual, considers it important to remind people that things are not always black and white, either/or, in sexuality or in gender. For a selection of Kara’s writing on the Showcase section of this site, click here

© 2005 Laura Hird All rights reserved.