A Letter from The Bow-wow Shop editor Michael Glover

I personally have never trusted dogs. I have a finger in a desk drawer to prove it. But when the blue dog was interred in Drumcliff Churchyard last November, in the long, gloom-struck shadow of the tomb of the blessed William Butler Yeats, I had no reason to suppose that his death-bed assurances were not veracious.

Yes, I had told him, we would be true to the conditions of the will, which included a strict demand that there would be no further issues of The Bow-Wow Shop. How could a magazine of that very particular kind continue without its editor? Imagine my amazement then when an old drinking-bowl companion of the cur in question slipped out just the other week that the will had never been witnessed. It was utterly invalid. We could do what we liked.

It is for this reason that The Bow-Wow Shop rises from its own ashes, with a small and relatively care-free bound. I use that word relatively with some care. Every magazine, large, medium or small, demands care, and the dog - why mince my words in what is proving to be quite a jolly aftermath? - was a taskmaster amongst taskmasters. Now things will run a little more easily.

That nonsense about publishing individual numbered issues as if this were a print magazine leaning pantingly, all letters bared, from the upper shelf of the news-stand has been done away with. From now on, there will be just the one Bow-Wow Shop, and we will add to it incrementally, as the stories and poems flow or fly in, sometimes slowly, at other times - we can only guess - at a faster pace. It will be a repository of rolling news, views and commentary about the ever richly farcical and deeply serious world of contemporary poetry, and it will also contain what the old Bow-Wow Shop contained - poems, features, interviews and reviews.

And the blue dog is still our mascot. Can you not see how he hovers at the top of this page, mock-menacingly? Let us salute him. Let us not readily forget him, toothless or not.

The Bow-Wow Shop, edited by Michael Glover, is online again at: www.bowwowshop.org.uk