Poetry review – WISH: Paul McDonald appreciates the directness and persistent optimism of Maggie Brookes-Butt’s well-crafted poems
Wish: New and Selected Poems
Maggie Brookes-Butt
Greenwich Exchange, London
ISBN: 9781910996850
£14.99
I’m wary of describing a poet’s work as ‘accessible’ because it can sound like a backhanded insult. I’m not sure why. The likes of Billy Collins, Carol Ann Duffy, and Wendy Cope (I could go on) manage to write exquisite and profound poems that are immediately comprehensible, and while complexity can be a joy, I’ve little time for those who feel that it’s a prerequisite. Certainly when I describe Maggie Brookes-Butt as ‘accessible’ I’m being unequivocally positive. I’ve been a fan of her work since the early Greenwich Exchange book, Lipstick (2007), and I’m delighted to see this lovely selection from the same press. It includes a sizable and impressive slice of fresh material, which continues to demonstrate Brookes-Butt’s unpretentious language, humour, and flair for finding universal significance in her lived experience.
The new poems include “Nuances of Fear” where she warns her granddaughter about life’s dangers, but advises against succumbing to ‘fearfulness’: excessive fear of strangers, for instance, precludes benefitting from their kindness. The key is learning how to manage this emotion, as suggested in the closing stanza:
I'd love to say don't be scared of looking foolish,
but that takes sixty years to learn. 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.
I love the line ‘politicians with lies for hair’ (which one are you thinking of?). Fearfulness in all its manifestations features often in the book, particularly in recent work where ecocide is a recurring theme. It clearly troubles Brookes-Butt as a mother and grandmother, and she hopes to invoke her progenies’ own ‘tongues of flame’ in response, passing the ‘baton’ to fresh generations of subversives.
In “The Conundrum of Proportion”, she observes her granddaughter trying to dress herself in her doll’s clothes: ‘balance her hat like a pimple on your head,/crush her cardboard-box bed with your giant toddler/body’, but rather than dampen her aspirations with common sense, she celebrates her ambition – adults aren’t always the best judge of ‘proportion’, with their willingness to believe that ‘code red for humanity/is small and far away’. In “Angelos” she sees a world where we no longer listen to angels – there was a time when ‘angels spoke’, and ‘even kings might stop and listen’ to their pleas for ‘peace and love’ – but we’ve become less receptive. These days angels resort to ‘glueing themselves/to motorways, hurling orange paint on gardens’ to convey ‘the unmistakable colour and tangy flavour of truth’; she urges her grandchild, and all of us, to ‘Learn to listen’ to these desperate modern messengers.
Clarity takes precedence over complexity in these poems, and the figurative language is rarely subtle, but the words gain strength from the force of the author’s convictions, and the fluency and directness of her voice. She often uses humour to great effect, creating lovely comic images, as in “Yoga”, where she exercises alongside her more flexible granddaughter, noting the child’s ‘toddler bendiness’:
…Let us look backwards
between our legs, marvel at the topsy-turvy
world and lie side by side, gripping our toes
while I learn from you how to be a happy baby.
It’s a ‘topsy-turvy world’, but this can be a source of delight as well as fear, and Brookes-Butt’s charm lies partly in her ability to convey that. Despite her concern for the challenges we face, her tone is frequently upbeat, with humour offering a welcome corrective to pessimism. Thus in “Certainty” she delights in the sight of her granddaughter trying to walk, ‘knees raised like a comic soldier, almost swinging/between the arms of the bent-over grown-up, laughing with delight at all the possibilities’. The joy of Brookes-Butt’s work is that she never loses sight of life’s possibilities. She puts her faith in kinship and love in poems like “Bulbs” where she speaks of the love ‘that will outlast my life’, or in “Love Seeps In” where love ‘fills me up […] claiming everything’, or in the title poem “Wish”, which closes
in the damp of the drizzle
in the warmth of a glove
let there ever be you
let there ever be love
.
While humour qualifies sentimentality in many of these poems, their author is not afraid to confront and express positive emotions directly, which is a refreshing trait that contributes to their buoyant, occasionally inspirational tone. She locates herself in a generational life-narrative, inheriting and bequeathing a respect for the planet and love for humanity. Despite her fears and eco-sensitivity, she finds hope, and detects progress. This is expressed clearly in “Behind Me”, which opens with the speaker struggling at the ‘dark and cold’ beginning of a working day. She recalls the tough lives ‘my grandmothers and all/my great-grandmothers’ led, ‘off to mills and factories/and scrubbing other people’s/floors’, and this puts her own ‘weary’ reluctance to face the day in perspective, underscoring the sense in which her family, and perhaps humankind generally, are on an improving trajectory. This faith in progress is conveyed succinctly in the closing lines:
We step into another day
where the sky lightens.
Life improves, and this might continue, her shift from the singular to the plural extending her trust in progress beyond the personal to the communal. The fact that readers won’t struggle to understand such metaphors doesn’t make them less meaningful, or in this case less effective. Wish is a book which eschews complexity in favour of forthright, heartfelt reflections on life and the redemptive potential of love: we can’t miss her point, but it’s a good one, with ‘the unmistakable colour and tangy flavour of truth’.
Mar 6 2025
London Grip Poetry Review – Maggie Brookes-Butt
Poetry review – WISH: Paul McDonald appreciates the directness and persistent optimism of Maggie Brookes-Butt’s well-crafted poems
I’m wary of describing a poet’s work as ‘accessible’ because it can sound like a backhanded insult. I’m not sure why. The likes of Billy Collins, Carol Ann Duffy, and Wendy Cope (I could go on) manage to write exquisite and profound poems that are immediately comprehensible, and while complexity can be a joy, I’ve little time for those who feel that it’s a prerequisite. Certainly when I describe Maggie Brookes-Butt as ‘accessible’ I’m being unequivocally positive. I’ve been a fan of her work since the early Greenwich Exchange book, Lipstick (2007), and I’m delighted to see this lovely selection from the same press. It includes a sizable and impressive slice of fresh material, which continues to demonstrate Brookes-Butt’s unpretentious language, humour, and flair for finding universal significance in her lived experience.
The new poems include “Nuances of Fear” where she warns her granddaughter about life’s dangers, but advises against succumbing to ‘fearfulness’: excessive fear of strangers, for instance, precludes benefitting from their kindness. The key is learning how to manage this emotion, as suggested in the closing stanza:
I love the line ‘politicians with lies for hair’ (which one are you thinking of?). Fearfulness in all its manifestations features often in the book, particularly in recent work where ecocide is a recurring theme. It clearly troubles Brookes-Butt as a mother and grandmother, and she hopes to invoke her progenies’ own ‘tongues of flame’ in response, passing the ‘baton’ to fresh generations of subversives.
In “The Conundrum of Proportion”, she observes her granddaughter trying to dress herself in her doll’s clothes: ‘balance her hat like a pimple on your head,/crush her cardboard-box bed with your giant toddler/body’, but rather than dampen her aspirations with common sense, she celebrates her ambition – adults aren’t always the best judge of ‘proportion’, with their willingness to believe that ‘code red for humanity/is small and far away’. In “Angelos” she sees a world where we no longer listen to angels – there was a time when ‘angels spoke’, and ‘even kings might stop and listen’ to their pleas for ‘peace and love’ – but we’ve become less receptive. These days angels resort to ‘glueing themselves/to motorways, hurling orange paint on gardens’ to convey ‘the unmistakable colour and tangy flavour of truth’; she urges her grandchild, and all of us, to ‘Learn to listen’ to these desperate modern messengers.
Clarity takes precedence over complexity in these poems, and the figurative language is rarely subtle, but the words gain strength from the force of the author’s convictions, and the fluency and directness of her voice. She often uses humour to great effect, creating lovely comic images, as in “Yoga”, where she exercises alongside her more flexible granddaughter, noting the child’s ‘toddler bendiness’:
It’s a ‘topsy-turvy world’, but this can be a source of delight as well as fear, and Brookes-Butt’s charm lies partly in her ability to convey that. Despite her concern for the challenges we face, her tone is frequently upbeat, with humour offering a welcome corrective to pessimism. Thus in “Certainty” she delights in the sight of her granddaughter trying to walk, ‘knees raised like a comic soldier, almost swinging/between the arms of the bent-over grown-up, laughing with delight at all the possibilities’. The joy of Brookes-Butt’s work is that she never loses sight of life’s possibilities. She puts her faith in kinship and love in poems like “Bulbs” where she speaks of the love ‘that will outlast my life’, or in “Love Seeps In” where love ‘fills me up […] claiming everything’, or in the title poem “Wish”, which closes
While humour qualifies sentimentality in many of these poems, their author is not afraid to confront and express positive emotions directly, which is a refreshing trait that contributes to their buoyant, occasionally inspirational tone. She locates herself in a generational life-narrative, inheriting and bequeathing a respect for the planet and love for humanity. Despite her fears and eco-sensitivity, she finds hope, and detects progress. This is expressed clearly in “Behind Me”, which opens with the speaker struggling at the ‘dark and cold’ beginning of a working day. She recalls the tough lives ‘my grandmothers and all/my great-grandmothers’ led, ‘off to mills and factories/and scrubbing other people’s/floors’, and this puts her own ‘weary’ reluctance to face the day in perspective, underscoring the sense in which her family, and perhaps humankind generally, are on an improving trajectory. This faith in progress is conveyed succinctly in the closing lines:
Life improves, and this might continue, her shift from the singular to the plural extending her trust in progress beyond the personal to the communal. The fact that readers won’t struggle to understand such metaphors doesn’t make them less meaningful, or in this case less effective. Wish is a book which eschews complexity in favour of forthright, heartfelt reflections on life and the redemptive potential of love: we can’t miss her point, but it’s a good one, with ‘the unmistakable colour and tangy flavour of truth’.