Southern Ocean Review, edited by Trevor Reeves and Judith Wolfe, is dually New Zealand's 'first on-line International Literary and Arts Magazine' and a regular journal, complete with staples, letters, pages all the routine paraphernalia usually associated with the rise of post-diluvian poetries When I first tried to it reach on-line using my friend's computer, I found myself miserably forestalled by her grappling libido, forced instead to glower at the cavernous prepuces of some wasted American hunk; but I suppose this is in itself evidence of a squalid half-truth extolled by too many Internet junkies - namely, that the world, in all its morning glory, can be slopped over one's fingertips with the aid of a primitive modem. I am no great fan of the Internet, and yet the hype surrounding it has meant S.O.R., at least in terms of its poetry content, is one of the better young journals in New Zealand. Foucault might have hmmed (if he wasn't too busy) at the list of reputable names in S.O.R. 6's contents page; but to give credit where it is due, the editors publish 'readily accessible' work, avoiding the recondite splurges of self-important writers, in favour of poetry that is fluid and essential - no matter who writes it.

Because S.O.R. is geared firstly as an on-line magazine, its material equivalent has a simple layout, though, being the indigenous Gnostic that I am, I readily excused this as a merest ordeal of the flesh. One cannot object to staples, when, in the ethereal world of the Intemet, such abasements are transcended; so it is unfair to dismiss S.O.R. immediately on the basis of its physique. What is obvious is the energy put into creating a magazine that does service to the $9.50 paid per issue: S.O.R. 6 is eighty eight pages long, publishing a pangolin of the imagination, from the gently ruminating poems of Elizabeth Smither, to John Gardiner's visceral fantasy 'A Grim Faerie Tale'. Accompanying pieces of writing are the burlesque sketches of Judith Wolfe: depictions of the venial musings of S.O.R.'s contributors.

It came to me as no surprise that the two poems I most enjoyed in S.O.R. 6 were both by Dunedin poets -Martha Morseth's 'Monsters' and Nick Ascroft's 'The Man Next Door': while priding itself on being an 'International Magazine of the Arts', S.O.R.'s base in Dunedin means it is also a physically accessible forum for South Island writing - and to ignore the undeniable quality of local writing would be an entirely in-expedient move on the part of its editors. Cynics have noted in the past the nepotistic tendencies of supposedly national journals, when the wealth of talent in their own regions seems to pass by largely unplumbed. While such gripes have always seemed to me symptomatic of a post-Dionysia blues, there can be no doubt as to the increased literary fertility consequent of an editor's decision to bless admiring poets with a journal; and S.O.R. is no exception - being the shining example of Nietzke's maxim "to esteem is to create".

As an on-line magazine, S.O.R. need not rely on the haphazard dissemination of texts that is the case of other New Zealand print journals similarly declaiming an international status The editors have clearly been in contact with a number of international literary web-sites (a list of electronic magazines is included in S.O.R. 6, and Trevor Reeves reviews A Patrimony of Fishes by Doug Lawson, editor of the on-line magazine The Blue Moon Review), so that, undoubtedly, there are writers across the world equally aware of S.O.R.'s presence. S.O.R. 6 contains work from America, Canada, the U.K, Australia and Brunei, bringing new writing from abroad into New Zealand, and exporting our writing to the world. It seems that our geographical isolation, for so long the gunnel of New Zealand's literary psyche, is slowly being rendered redundant as an excuse for the cultivated insularity of New Zealand's art scene.

Trevor Reeves was among the first to publish the American poet William Wantling, who was incarcerated in California State Prison for heroin addiction; consequently, he is no stranger to the tribulations of exposing new writing -no matter what its background. Some of the work by overseas writers I found disturbing, perhaps naive, in its candid discussion of taboo issues like rape and brain injury; but, at the very least, such guileless presentations challenge the conservative nature of New Zealand's literary scene, pressing us to grow from our repressive Anglocentric chrysalis into the imago of a more assertively intellectual post-colonial identity. Readers of S.O.R. will invariably come to recognise the high quality of New Zealand writing in relation to its international counterparts, and such quality is perhaps a product of art's distillation in this, our culture of isolation; and yet in many aspects of its intellectual life New Zealand is now sadly behind its colonial peers. Web-sites like S.O.R., as alternatives to the smut of cyber-space, are an opportunity for New Zealanders to log into the literary life of other parts of the globe, if only to reassess from a relatively objective stance the state of contemporary New Zealand writing.