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 Neil Fulwood of "New and Selected Poems" by Julian Stannard

As usual, when a new collection of poetry lands on my desk, I open it at random and sample two or three poems to get a feel for tone, content and the author’s personal style, before reading the book in sequence and mulling over my review. At random in this case turned out to be page 21 and a poem called "Speed," which concerns itself with a volume of Rupi Kaur, a waste-paper basket and the peregrination of the one toward the other. Grinning devilishly, I flipped toward a hundred and some pages and alighted on "Closed," a wry state-of-the-nation piece which ends with a memorable redefinition of "Protestant Work Ethic." I stuck the kettle on, settled back and started at the beginning. I ripped through the book’s 247 pages in two sittings.

Let’s be honest: a lot of poetry can be po-faced. Overly serious, with humour regarded as the province of light verse, and light verse regarded as something of a pejorative. Hallelujah, then, for Julian Stannard, who gives us the best of both worlds: poetry that blends intellectual rigour, sterling craftsmanship and sly wit in a seemingly effortless manner. 

There’s a mordant Englishman abroad aesthetic in poems like "The Blessing of the Octopus at Lerici," "Piazza Della Posta Vecchia" and the magnificently titled "The Road to Bastardo," but mainly he achieves the kind of loose-limbed informality that was the trademark of the New York school (only without the attendant self-indulgence or tendency to the verbose). Not that Stannard aligns himself with any particular movement or trend. Simply, he doesn’t need to. And speaking of magnificent titles, wait till you experience the pure delirious joy of "The Gargantuan Muffin Beauty Contest." Or "Well-Regulated Dumplings." It takes some skill to fashion poems that live up to titles like these.

Flipping through the book once again - already it’s proving one of those handful of titles in my collection that I find myself instinctively drawn back to - I looked for something succinct, something I could quote in full, that would give the reader a flavour of the Julian Stannard experience. Almost immediately, "What Did I Find on Bogliasco Beach" presented itself:

         Bottle-tops, bottle-tops, bottle-tops
         grey stones and some smaller red ones too

         desiccated seaweed, stuff mostly
         and something that once hung from a tree.

         And oh yes I found a pair of lips.

To use a cliché more suited to film reviews, Stannard’s New & Selected is a wild ride. Do yourself a favour: buy a ticket; take the trip.

About the reviewer 
Neil Fulwood lives and works in Nottingham. He has published four full poetry collections with Shoestring Press, No Avoiding It, Can’t Take Me Anywhere, Service Cancelled, and The Point of the Stick, and a volume of political satires, Mad Parade, with Smokestack Books.

You can read more about New and Selected Poems by Julian Stannard on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Review by Rosa Fernandez of "Spillway: New and Selected Poems" by Ian Pople

 

I confess I was unaware of Ian Pople’s work prior to reading Spillway, but in many ways that has allowed me to get to know the full range of his work with this collection, one that includes selections from his previous publications with the addition of some new poems. As this suggests, it is a large and engrossing series, and one I enjoyed gently meandering through. 

The first selection, from The Glass Enclosure, takes us all the way back to 1996, and from then to the present there are clear themes that return consistently. Nature and weather and place are all important in Pople’s writing and many of my favourite mentions were of trees, often named specifically as in ‘guava trees’ or ‘silver birches.’ Water flows in and throughout, hence the ‘spillway’ of the title, and you can definitely see the influence of Pople’s interest in American poetry with the wide landscapes that he describes.

Pople’s poems often explore and reference faith, with winter described as a ‘sacrament’ and numerous references to church, the Easter story, verses and lambs; in so doing the poems seem to take on a timeless quality. This, combined with the beautifully described bleaker landscapes, put me in mind of R. S. Thomas at times, although a sprinkling of names throughout indicate plentiful inspiration from others, particularly jazz musicians as in the poem ‘William Matthews’ about Charles Mingus.

Pople is well travelled, and Spillway begins with poems about Manchester and the Sudan and ends on the Khao San Road in Bangkok, visiting many other places in between; ‘Athens’ and ‘Giverny’ get their own poems. A life well lived and comprehensively documented, Spillway is a collection for all weathers, all places, and many appreciative readers.

About the reviewer
Rosa Fernandez is a slam-winning poet and sometime proofreader. She also enjoys wearing silly hats. 

You can read more about Spillway by Ian Pople on Creative Writing at Leicester here.