Maggie Brookes-Butt, "Wish: New and Selected Poems"

Maggie Brookes-Butt has been writing all her life, starting work as a journalist and a BBC TV documentary producer. Her books include six poetry collections as Maggie Butt and two historical novels as Maggie Brookes, published by Penguin Random House. She taught creative writing at Middlesex University for 30 years, and was a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the University of Kent. As well as being a writer she is a compulsive reader, hopeful gardener, dreadful cook, besotted grandmother and a Londoner to the bone, though she loves to swim in the sea.

About Wish: New and Selected Poems
Wish contains 50 poems from Maggie's six previous collections, about the strength of women, concern for our planet, and hope in the power of love. They are gathered here alongside 21 bitter-sweet new poems about the joys and fears of a grandmother in this troubled, vulnerable and precious world. The new poems are addressed to her young grandchildren, to be read by them when they grow up.

You can read more about Wish on the author's website here. Below, you can read two poems from the poetry collection. 

From Wish, by Maggie Brookes-Butt

Murmur

My heart is whispering – this faint back-wash
is slush and suck of waves over shingle,
tumbling the stones which will lie underwater
when storms rage far above their flooded world.
 
My heart is whispering – a breeze turns
over leaves, its shivery message passes
from branch to branch at the far-off crackle
of forest flames and thudding feet of animals.
 
But whispers lullaby your sleeping form,
your peaceful unknowing, sharing secrets
of here-and-gone, here-and-gone. Listen
to its echo: love ... love ... love ...
 

Eyes
 
Mine have seen first breaths and lasts,
the beginning and end of everything,
 
green shoots and heaps of rotting leaves.
They've seen horses pulling coal drays,
 
milk bottle tops pecked by blue-tits,
peace camps, walls torn down, glass
 
ceilings cracking, gay weddings,
but children slippered in class, life vests
 
washed up beside migrant boats, turtles
choked by plastic bags, smoking ruins.
 
Mine are hooded now, the teal and amber
marbled irises surrounded by crinkled deltas
 
of skin, but still see clearly thanks to small
acrylic miracles and astonishing dexterity.
 
Yours are wide and bright, the whites whiter
than paper, almost blue, the irises two shades
 
of grey, dove grey circled by wet-slate grey.
They can spot the smallest dot of crumb,
 
bending to retrieve it, or point to the woods
where a squirrel is camouflaged against a trunk.
 
I can see what's coming, my vision unclouded
by the twin cataracts of helplessness and dismay.
 
Polar bears claim abandoned villages. Tanks roll
in again. Together we watch the leaves fall.

 

Michelene Wandor, "Orfeo's Last Act"

 

Michelene Wandor is a playwright, poet, fiction writer and cultural critic. She has taught Creative Writing for over three decades, currently as tutor on the Distance Learning MA at Lancaster University. Her most recent poetry collection is Travellers (Arc Publications). She is editor of the anthology Critical-Creative Writing: Two Sides of the Same Coin. Her new novel is Orfeo's Last Act (Greenwich Exchange, 2023). Her website is here.  

About Orfeo's Last Act: A Novel in Two Parts

Set against the backdrop of seventeenth-century northern Italy in the Golden Age, Orfeo’s Last Act brings the magic of Mantua, Florence and Venice to vivid life.

The Gonzaga Duke objects to the violent ending of Monteverdi’s opera, Orfeo. With the help of Jewish composer, Salamone Rossi, Monteverdi supplies a new happy Act V. The original ending is lost.

In twenty-first-century Britain, amateur musician, Emilia, discovers a faded musical manuscript in an East Anglian stately home ... Across the centuries, harmony and discord vie for resolution in a story which thrills and shocks.

A triumphant debut from the poet and critic, Michelene Wandor, Orfeo’s Last Act is a must read for anyone interested in historical fiction or classical music.

You can read more about Orfeo's Last Act on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an extract from the opening of the novel. 

From Orfeo's Last Act, by Michelene Wandor

One

The mist mixes with spatters of mud, the stench of shit and sweat, wet and warm, mud drops on my arms, my face and round my eyes, till I blink and breathe water, human and animal detritus, the fertile muck of the fields. It reminds me of the rains of 1599. Mutazione di secolo. The end of the century, or the end of the world.  

I climb up the bank from the lake, skirt the Castello di San Giorgio, and walk round the Cattedrale di San Pietro. I stand for a moment: across the Piazza di San Pietro, I see the Palazzo Ducale. 

I walk along the side of the piazza, thinking I must be careful not to tread on any of the cracks in the cobbles. If I do, the ground will heave and throb under the sucking impact of my soft, silent shoes, and I will be sucked down into the marshes until there is nothing left of me but my voice.

I know this is ridiculous. First of all, the cobbles are so small, that I can’t help treading on the joins between them, and nothing happens when I do. Anyway, it is a long time since the marshes threatened anyone at this end of the island, this fiercely covered and protected end. The marshes have long been drained, filled in, built upon. 

There are still canals, remnants of the many rivers and waterways which criss-crossed the island. And yet, I am safer here than in Venice, where canals haunt at every turn, where it is easy to disappear in the middle of the black night. I am safer here than on the hills of Florence.