Review by Jonathan Taylor of "Wish: New & Selected Poems" by Maggie Brookes-Butt

In his ‘Ode on Melancholy,’ John Keats famously suggests that ‘Ay, in the very temple of Delight / Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine.’ And perhaps it works the other way round too: in the temple of Melancholy, there’s a shrine to Delight. 

Maggie Brookes-Butt’s life-affirming collection, Wish: New & Selected Poems, encompasses both alternatives: her poems are sometimes temples of Delight which house shrines to ‘Veil’d Melancholy,’ sometimes temples of political Melancholy, which open up to reveal Delight, Joy, Beauty. As many have pointed out, contemporary poetry is – as far as it’s possible to generalise – not always on home ground when it comes to delight or happiness or joy. Joy is all-too-often left to birthday card rhymes, seen as naïve in an age of end-game capitalism, political polarisation and climate disaster. 

The poems in Wish, though, are far from naïve: this is a grown-up, fierce, brave joy that can thrive in the teeth of political realism. In the opening sequence, Brookes-Butt stages imaginary conversations with her infant granddaughter, which are both celebrations of shared love, and honest appraisals of the future the latter has been born into. In the poem ‘Realities,’ for instance, she writes:

                    The whine of chainsaws
          plagues the forests, while glaciers silently drip. Missiles
          land on another hospital, another school. And the people 
          we love go away and we never see them again …

          But let us not go there today. Better by far to hold my hand
          and look for bears in the woods, mermaids diving
          from the rocks, Father Christmas landing on the roof, 
          dance the hokey-cokey and sing “that’s what it’s all about.”

This is what Brookes-Butt’s poems do so beautifully: they dance the hokey-cokey, find the bears in the woods and mermaids on the rocks, while still facing up to the ‘realities’ of the modern world. A dawn chorus, for example, is ‘a technicolour / torrent-of-sound, reminding, insisting, in spite / of everything – there is joy in the world, / there is so much joy.’ Even in a Second World War prison camp, the downtrodden inmates find ‘unexpected peace’ in an allotment, where they ‘grow gifts / of vegetables or flowers to give on visit day.’

Like the inmates, Brookes-Butt's poems often find 'unexpected peace,' miniature utopias, in a wider context of turbulence and degeneration. Hers is not an escapist joy, though, that turns away from horror. Rather, it’s the kind of visionary and radical joy that Friedrich Schiller and Ludwig van Beethoven might have understood – a joy that challenges present and future ‘Realities.’ Even if, in that particular poem, the poet ultimately declares ‘let us not go there today’ to her grandchild, the implication is that such realities will have to be faced in the future. And the collection as a whole holds onto a radical and joyful optimism for that future, in spite of fear, in spite of melancholy, ‘in spite of everything’:

For now leave
fear about the drowning and scorching of your world
to me. I have enough for both of us. When I’m too
voiceless to protest, too old to carry a placard, 
I’ll hand it to you like a baton or perhaps a fiery
sword, and you can run in my stead. We will defy
the politicians with lies for hair, shout down
fearfulness itself with tongues of flame. 

About the reviewer
Jonathan Taylor is director of Everybody's Reviewing. His most recent book is the memoir A Physical Education: On Bullying, Discipline & Other Lessons (Goldsmiths, 2024). He teaches Creative Writing at the University of Leicester. His website is here. 

Review by Jonathan Taylor of "The Moon Looks on Them All: Of Friends and Friendship" by John Lucas

Despite their reputation for egocentrism, memoirs are often – perhaps always – about relationships between a narrator and other people. As critics Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson point out, “there is a relational aspect to most life writing," and many others have claimed something similar. This “relationality” (as they call it) most commonly encompasses fathers, mothers, siblings, children; but there is a growing sub-genre of memoirs and personal essays which recognises the vital role played by friends in our lives. John Lucas’s fascinating and wide-ranging The Moon Looks on Them All is a significant and beautifully-written contribution to this sub-genre of friendship-memoirs (filikigraphy?). 

Like all the best books about friendship, what Lucas’s memoir recognises is that “relationality” does not simply mean that the story is about two (or three, or fifteen) people rather than one. No: "relationality" means that the relationships themselves become focal points, main characters, above and beyond the individuals involved. Friendships are themselves stories: friendships have narrative arcs of many different kinds, and each of the chapters in Lucas’s book is, first and foremost, a story of a key friendship in the author’s life. Of course we find out about the amazing individuals involved – poets, academics, jazz musicians, E. M. Forster, Brian Clough, Lucas’s cat – but above and beyond that, we follow the story of Lucas’s changing relationships with them over time.

The result is a life-affirming patchwork of interweaving friendships, voices, anecdotes, poems and brilliantly-drawn character portraits. At one point, Lucas admits that “sooner or later, everyone I meet, and get to know, will remind me of a character in Dickens” - and The Moon Looks on Them All is rather like a Dickens novel, teeming with memorable characters. If the cumulative effect of a Dickens novel is often that the reader feels immersed in a vibrant all-encompassing community, something similar might be said, on a microcosmic scale, of the community of friends in Lucas’s memoir. He cites E. M. Forster’s faith in “Love, the beloved Republic,” in “an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate, and the plucky” – and that seems to me as good a description as any of the utopian community of friends which Lucas depicts in this book. 

About the reviewer
Jonathan Taylor is an author, editor, lecturer and critic. His two most recent books are the memoir A Physical Education: On Bullying, Discipline & Other Lessons (Goldsmiths, 2024), and the short story collection Scablands and Other Stories (Salt, 2023). He directs the MA in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester. 

Review by Kim Wiltshire of "Orfeo's Last Act" by Michelene Wandor

Orfeo’s Last Act is an ambitious dual-narrative novel, telling the tale of the Renaissance Jewish musician Salamone Rossi and the modern-day Professor of English Emilia Constantine. During an early music conference, Emilia finds the original last act of what is considered one of the first operas, Orfeo, in a trunk in an old manor house in East Anglia – left by Rossi when he was working there as a teacher over 400 years ago. The find reveals Rossi, and not Monteverdi, to be the original composer of this fifth act, and gives Emilia a dilemma in terms of what to do with this discovery. 

The novel is well researched with a firm understanding of the historical era; the writer clearly understands her music and there is a nice reimagining of how this final act might have been created. 

The novel’s structure itself is interesting, with the Renaissance strand on the left-hand page and the modern strand on the right-hand page; at first, I wasn’t sure how to read the book – all the first part then all the second part, or alternate strands. I suspect that it can be left up to the reader how they choose to read it. I chose to read the first part in its entirety, then the second part, but I’d be interested to hear from anyone who has tried reading alternate chapters, to know whether this gives a different sense of the intertwined stories. 

The story rattles along at a fair pace, and there is a huge cast of characters to get to know alongside a vivid sense of how life was for Jewish communities in Europe during the Renaissance, which comes across very clearly. Indeed, there is much research and scholarship that has gone into this novel, and clearly this is a really important era and subject for the author, as the back cover tells us that she has an early music group and plays the music of Rossi herself, which is a lovely addendum to the book. 

About the reviewer
Dr Kim Wiltshire is a playwright and writer whose research involves theatre / writing for social change and arts for health. She is currently a British Academy Innovation Fellow and is a Reader and Programme Leader for Creative Writing at Edge Hill University.

Review by Jonathan Taylor of "Summer Nineteen Forty-Five" by John Lucas

In his famous essay The Lion and the Unicorn (1941), George Orwell declares that, for those fighting in the Second World War, ‘a better life is ahead for them … and their children.’ Ironically, the darkest days of the war simultaneously encode a moment of utopian, visionary promise: Orwell believes that a very ‘English revolution’ might emerge from the wreckage of the war. This strain of optimism, idealism and utopianism can be traced throughout the war – in works such as Powell and Pressburger's film A Matter of Life and Death, for example – and immediately afterwards, in the popular jubilation of V.E. Day, and the subsequent election of Clement Attlee’s Labour government. It is also one of the subjects of John Lucas’s beautiful and poignant third novel, Summer Nineteen Forty-Five. 

In this novel, set in the aftermath of V.E. Day, the main character’s mother puts a ‘VOTE LABOUR’ poster in the window, and constantly looks to ‘“the promise of the future,”’ when ‘“everything will be better.”’ She is one of many people ‘“who genuinely hoped the world would be different after ’45,”’ as her son, Peter Howard, puts it. The novel celebrates this hopefulness – arising from the joy of victory in both war and subsequent General Election – whilst also charting the disappointment, disillusionment, which accompanied it: ‘“They built their hopes too high,”’ says the son, many years later. 

Somehow, everything seems to change, or seems about to change for the better in 1945, and yet, paradoxically, nothing changes; as Orwell suggests, ‘England will still be England, an everlasting animal stretching into the future and the past, and, like all living things, having the power to change out of recognition and yet remain the same.’ This paradox is what the locals in Lucas’s novel flippantly call the ‘“same difference”’: everything is different, everything stays the same. Likewise, the main character, Peter Howard, ‘must have thought that in the days and weeks following the announcement of Victory in Europe the village of Stonely would continue to breathe the atmosphere that lit up each new day of peace … Now: open the window, inhale the new air. Stretch out a hand to feel the breeze on your bare skin, shiver excitedly at its promise. But no. It didn’t take long to fade, this excitement, it dwindled, dulled, sank back into ordinariness … As the summer went on so, he recalls, in the faces of people he passed in the street … the shadow of disappointment, of let-down … The anticipation [was] so great, the realisation so small.’

One of the problems, as the novel makes clear, is that the anticipation of change for the better – the belief in a new beginning – is always haunted by the past, in this case the horrors and losses of wartime. And not only the past: in the small village of Stonely, the horrors of wartime seem to carry on, after V.E. Day, in the unexplained death of a young evacuee, Lorna May, and the suicide of a local boy. Peacetime is still haunted by violence, evil and loss: ‘When, many years later, Peter thinks back to the summer of 1945, it occurs to him that … the unappeased spirit of the girl was haunting the woods … Something bad had happened … You could say that some malevolent power had been set loose. But you could as well say that this was not confined to a small, rural area of the English Midlands, any more than it was a unique phenomenon of the time when wickedness – Auschwitz, Babi Yar, Hiroshima – provided all the evidence anyone could require of the insufficiency, the fraility, of light, warmth, kindness, against the world of night.’

This tension between light, warmth, kindness and, indeed, hope, as opposed to ‘the world of night’ is everywhere in the novel. Lorna May’s death, its subsequent sensational treatment by the local press, the behaviour of the villagers, and the suicide of one of the suspects, all of these images come to symbolise what Peter Howard calls ‘“a wider betrayal”’ of post-war optimism. In this way, Lucas’s novel stands as a powerful microcosm of wider, historical, political and social trends. It also stands as a very contemporary warning, at a time when the promise of Orwell’s England, Howard’s mother’s optimism, of war-time idealism, post-war Socialism, of the NHS, the Welfare State, seems most under threat. 
   

About the reviewer
Jonathan Taylor is an author, lecturer, editor and critic. His books include the novels Melissa (Salt, 2015) and Entertaining Strangers (Salt, 2012), and the memoir Take Me Home (Granta, 2007). His website is www.jonathanptaylor.co.uk.