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 Cathi Rae of "everlove" by Maggie Butt

This is Maggie Butt's sixth full collection in a poetry career of almost twenty years. It has been described as “a mature, devastating and ultimately redemptive work” (Jacqueline Saphra) and it is all of that and much more. My reasons for reviewing it were completely selfish in that I knew that a previous collection had been built on real lives, historical interviews and photographs, an area of writing of particular interest to me post an MA thesis using social media data and imagery to create a collection. 

Her new collection starts with a sequence of poems inspired by the work of the painter Mary Behrens and her photographs of refugees, and these poems are beautiful, focusing on the small, the relatable, to make tangible the refugee experience – in the poem "Shoes," she asks the simple question, if you had to leave your home, which one pair of shoes would you take with you? Sometimes it’s those tiny questions that  help us to have some understanding of what losing everything might feel like and in a way that avoids the polemical or the obvious.

Butt's background in journalism, the ability to use small details to make larger statements and her razor-sharp observation to draw the reader in to empathise and share emotions and experiences are everywhere in this collection. These range from the title poem “everlove” which explores loss – the loss of an earring and the loss of a person and ends “the earring turned up         caught on a sock / and you are here       deep in the core       of me” - to “The Repair Shop,” written during lockdown but which manages to say something new about an experience when for many of us, nothing was new or interesting.

This is a beautiful, deft, and polished collection which will bear reading and re-reading for a very long time.

About the reviewer
Cathi Rae is currently working on a PhD looking at marginalised lives and poetry. She has recently been awarded a Midlands 4 Cities scholarship to fund this work.

Review by Jonathan Taylor of "Degrees of Twilight" by Maggie Butt

According to Shelley, "poetry ... may be considered as the bridge thrown over the stream of time" - and there is certainly something peculiar to poetry about its relationship to time, something which marks poetry out - which, maybe, is part of its essence. Whereas painting and sculpture are naturally static forms, with no obvious fourth dimensions (though, of course, there are ways in which that stasis is subverted or complicated); whereas prose narrative fiction, at least in English, is naturally a linear form (in that it's read in a linear way, and set out as such, even when linearity is brought into question); and whereas music is necessarily experienced in a linear, almost narrative way; poetry is different. Often read in a non-linear way (you read a poem, then perhaps re-read it, and your eye does not necessarily move smoothly across the page, left to right), poetry is perhaps the most successful art form at capturing the complexity of time, at throwing a "bridge ... over the stream of time." Clearly, narrative prose fiction does have a fourth dimension - but, as I say, that time element assumes, more often than not, a basic linear, chronological mode, even where that linearity is disrupted.

Poetry can do something different: poetry, as Maggie Butt realises in her brilliant new collection, Degrees of Twilight (London Magazine, 2015), can simultaneously hold in its hand the present, past and future. In Butt's poetry, the reader can "listen to the future: rain-rocked, lake-like" precisely because "nothing divides the waters from the waters" - past, present, future waters all intermingle in her poems. Butt's poetry hears voices "calling down the years" from the past, watches as the present "all goes on," and foresees "futures latent as a roll of undeveloped film."

There are poems here which, to use her own words, are "forward-facing" and ones which are "backward-facing," watching the "open country of the past / spread itself far as the eye can see." And there are a lot of poems which are both: in the remarkble poem "Time Travellers," for example, "time zig-zags like a running man avoiding bullets," encompassing, as it does, scenes from a whole personal history; in "New Mothers," the mothers cry not just for present pain, but also for future "falls we can't womb you against: / the bully teachers, failures, phone calls in the night / beyond our arms," for which the mothers "paid up-front in tears"; in "Variance Analysis," a dull meeting "in a windowless room" is happening simultaneously "while the first day of spring unfurls outside; / and you are motorbiking scented country lanes / absorbing this year's deficit."

This is the poetry of simultaneity, of synchronicity, as multiple pasts, presents and futures co-exist in the same poems, sometimes even same lines. In the final poem, "Wish," the narrator poignantly attempts to reach towards a kind of Shelleyean timelessness, whereby, as Shelley himself puts it, "time and place and number are not." Here, future, past and present - the "years scampering by"- all finally seem to dissolve in the face of the narrator's wishes: "let there ever be you / let there ever be you."

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 poetry collection Musicolepsy (Shoestring, 2013). His website is www.jonathanptaylor.co.uk.