Maggie Butt is an ex-journalist and BBC television producer turned poet and novelist.
Her poetry collection Degrees of Twilight (2015) follows Sancti Clandestini – Undercover Saints, an illustrated hagiography of imaginary saints, and Ally Pally Prison Camp, which tells a little-known first world war story. Earlier collections were petite and Lipstick. Her novel House of Dreams was published as Maggie Brookes.
Maggie is an Associate Professor at Middlesex University and an Advisory Fellow for the Royal Literary Fund. She has judged the Frogmore, Ver Poets and Barnet poetry competitions, and this year is judging the Ware and Segora.
Norwegian Wood
Cinderpath snakes down betweentrees
from top-of-mountain, zigzagging
through birch-beside-spruce, rock-over-shale,
fern-under-bracken; fjord glimpsed below
never climbing closer, its sparkledazzle
flashing hints of an outsidewood
sunshineworld, miniature city with muss
of rooftops, cars which are firefly
glints-of-light; while here is all dapplehush,
brook chirruping beside path, waterfalls
triptumbling over ledges-boulders,
lapping moss-stain waist-high round treetrunks
as if sea of verdigris had washed through
leaving lush as pasture-after-rain;
and sometimes a shortcut, offtrack,
sharp-slithers down between treeroots,
tempts us to downscramble, sliceoff a bend,
but we choose path-most-travelled,
slower, take-your-time, lookaround route
and on next hairpinbend, in greenest-green
heartwood, people before have built
dozens of cairns, smallstones heaped
ontopof eachother, like faerytowers
or pebbles-on-graves, and we carefulchoose
fingersmooth handweigh balance
our own, honouring those who went
ahead in evergreen peace-of-the-wood.
Maggie Butt
First published in The London Magazine.
