Editorial

‘The best words in their best order’, for both poetry and prose, was my take on Coleridge’s ideal as I began to read submissions for this first ever issue of Horizon Review. It’s never an easy task to find work of a consistently high quality, especially with a brand-new arts magazine, but I feel confident that this launch issue is going to excite, surprise and provoke our readers. And since Horizon Review was inspired by and named after Cyril Connolly’s incisive literary magazine from the 1940s, that is what I have been looking for from submissions: intensity and precision of effect and purpose, critical acumen, and visionary innovation.

It’s been almost ten years since I last edited a literary magazine, but it didn’t take long for me to slip back into the editor’s chair as though I’d never left it. Indeed, putting together this first issue has highlighted two things for me about editing a magazine: firstly, that it’s extremely hard work, demanding long hours and an unprecedented intake of caffeine, and secondly, that when you look down that finished contents list and know you’ve got it right, the sense of joy is absolute.

From the beginning, I wanted to avoid the literary clique and the business of ‘setting out one’s stall’ and to encourage instead a broad spectrum of voices and ideas into the magazine. That seems to me the way forward in literature, for writers – and readers – to develop a ‘blurring’ of previously clear-cut demarcations between literary spaces. (In this issue, the novelist China Miéville refers to a similar trend in his candid interview with Steve Haynes.) In order to achieve a strong and eclectic mix, I chose to disregard the usual – and often vehemently fixed – boundaries between mainstream and avant, between genres, between particular types or schools of writers. And the result, as I’m sure you’ll soon discover, is fascinating and dynamic.

As well as that interview with China Miéville, in this issue you’ll find an in-depth appreciation by the art critic Richard Yeomans of Colin Dick, a carnivalesque ‘regionalist’ painter, with urban and rural scenes in and around London and Coventry. Our Horizon columnist and literary commentator Peter Robins takes the Booker’s temperature and declares it sadly under the weather. Elsewhere, we have the usual round-up of new poetry under review, George Ttoouli asks where the magic has gone in contemporary poetry, and Luigi Bonomi of the literary agency LBA lets us in on the secrets of acquiring an agent – in less than 60 seconds!

In our Fiction section, we have a range of stories by up-and-coming writers as well as more established names, including challenging new fiction from David Belbin and Elizabeth Baines. The poet David Morley invents some environmentally-friendly forms with his ‘natural calligrammes’ and we have new poetry from the likes of George Szirtes, Alison Brackenbury, Josephine Balmer and Zoë Brigley. Newcomers to watch in the Poetry section include Sarah Howe, with her enigmatic ‘Islands’, and Liam Guilar, who attempts to reinvent modern Coventry as a medieval mindscape in poems from his forthcoming ‘Godiva’ sequence. We also have a powerful translation by Mark Williams of the newly-discovered Fifth Branch of the Mabinogi, the Amaethon Uab Dôn.

Looking ahead to our next issue, due out March 2009, I would like to invite submissions of drama as well as the usual poems, stories and reviews. This can be work in progress or finished pieces to be published whole – depending on length – or as an extract. I am also actively seeking reviewers both for new theatrical productions and for literary novels. Accomplished writers with expertise in web-based media – podcasts, audio files, interactive installations, film etc. – are also welcome to submit new work or ideas.

Jane Holland