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Archipelago
Edited by Katherine McNamara
Reviewed by Ingrid Woodrow

Archipelago is described as an International Journal of Literature, the Arts, and Opinion. It has the austere, educated feel of one of the Serious Literary Journals such as Critical Inquiry, with an elegant design and attitude to match. Much time and effort has been put into making this 'zine work on the Web, but I can't see too many people parting with 98 pages of A4 paper (plus ink) to print it out, which is a shame, since that's the only way you'll get through it without giving up - or giving yourself serious eye-strain.

I recently received a mailout from the editor of Archipelago, Katherine McNamara, drawing my attention to Sandor Kanyadi, whose poem "All Souls' Day in Vienna" appears for the first time in English in the current issue. Kanyadi is rumored to be a hot contender for the Nobel Prize. His poem strikes me as a little jarring in translation, but there are flashes of brilliance. It's a bit of an epic, peppered with language and discourse that some may find a tad obscure, but if you get this far into the journal it's likely you're not fazed by that kind of thing.

For the literary-minded, there's much to recommend Archipelago: resources, recommended reading, fiction, essays, even a few images to break the monotony of all those pages of text.

Gerry Hull's 'from B,' is an exquisite piece, though less inquisitive readers may dismiss it as a jumbled mess. I did too, until I reduced the magnification of the Acrobat version so that I could see the pages as if they were laid out in front of me. What it amounts to is this: six pages, a paragraph to a page, numbered in the sequence 6, 30, 41, 45, 50, 70, as if they are random sheets pulled from a manuscript. The writing is superb, if baffling. The last page is narrated by one of the employees at a zoo that fell into various stages of decrepitude until finally the animals were allowed to roam free in the grounds:

Sometimes one lost its way through the front gate and strayed into the adjacent city park, and there it usually ended, in the center of a huddle of mute bystanders. Perhaps it was not so strange how at such moments we forgot our own complicity at the very moment it ought to have filled us with shame, how mesmerized we were by the creature gasping at our feet, as if we were hearing the sound of our own breathing for the very first time. Most of us had not seen a thing die so completely by itself, particularly at such close range, and the sight touched us with a horror we had not felt since we were children.

As standard practice in Archipelago, words like "e-zine" and "Webzine" are placed in double inverted commas, which gives the 'zine a stilted, clinical feel that may grate with some readers. If there is anything wrong with Archipelago, it is that it suffers from a distinct lack of humor. Okay, so it is not compulsory for literary 'zines to have a light touch, but it helps when you are treading the fine line between literary and pompous. If you take your literature seriously, though, Archipelago is a good place to explore, and if your eyes (or your printer) can handle it, bookmark it.

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Ingrid Woodrow is a writer based in Brisbane, Australia. Her first novel, Goddess and the Galaxy Boy, will be published in early 2001. She is completing a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Queensland and working on a new novel.She is also the founding editor of the online writing journal Mangrove, which is listed as a "Site of National Significance" in the National Library of Australia's PANDORA archive.

Further information and samples of her work can be obtained by visiting www.uq.edu.au/~eniwoodr