Maggie & Maggie

An engaged and enthralled audience were treated last night to the words and worlds brought to us in Greenwich by Maggie Brookes-Butt and Maggie Harris.

Maggie B-B was presenting her new collection, published in January by Greenwich Exchange. Wish contains new and selected poems (the latter taken from her six previous collections). The main theme of the new poems is grandmotherhood, and brought smiles and tears and many a-ha moments of recognition – turning everyday language into exquisite poetry by her sharpness of observation and unexpected images. I have the book now, and can’t wait to read it through. If you want a copy at a special price, go to greenex.co.uk

Maggie H read from her latest poetry collection, I Sing to the Greenhearts (Seren, 2025) and an excerpt from her memoir, Kiskadee Girl (Cane Arrow Press, 2024) – and we were immediately transported to her native Guyana. Dazzling colours and sounds (from trees, birds, people and the river that featured so prominently in Maggie’s early life) and yet more grandmothers (I’m so glad they made such a strong appearance!) were vividly portrayed in language that sometimes picked up local accents and spellings. Beautifully read, exciting, evocative, nostalgic but never sentimental – I wish I could have listened for much longer….

This was one leg of the two Maggies’ reading tour, and I wish them every success. They deserve it.

Here’s more about them:

Maggie Brookes-Butt has been writing all her life, as a journalist, BBC TV producer, creative writing academic and Royal Literary Fund Fellow. Her books include six poetry collections as Maggie Butt and two historical novels as Maggie Brookes. 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. Maggie will be reading from Wish, her newly published volume of new and selected poems (Greenwich Exchange, 2025). It gathers poems from Maggie’s six previous collections – about the strength of women, concern for our planet, and hope in the power of love – alongside bitter-sweet new poems about the joys and fears of a grandmother in this troubled, vulnerable and precious world.

As well as being published widely in many journals, Maggie Harris has plenty of awards to her credit: the Guyana Prize for Literature not once but twice; The Commonwealth Short Story Regional Prize and the Wales Poetry Award.She is a Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund and has worked as Creative Writing tutor, Reader Development Worker and International Teaching Fellow. Her poem ‘Canterbury’ is an Art installation in the city’s Westgate Gardens, and ‘Lit by Fire’, her poem  about the North Foreland Lighthouse, was commissioned by the BBC. She has read her work internationally and has collaborated with artists across genres since 1990, resulting in some of her work being set to music. Her poem ‘This is Not a Gospel Song’ can be heard and watched on YouTube. In 2024 she was awarded an Arts Council grant towards revisiting Guyana and its rain forest. Maggie read from her 11^th book, I Sing to the Greenhearts (SEREN, 2025), and from her memoir Kiskadee Girl (Cane Arrow Press, 2024).

‘Mica Press launch: new poetry from Rosie Johnston, Michael Vince and Antony Johae.’ With additional readings by Nayma Chamchoun, Michael Foley and Leslie Bell

A few days after World Poetry Day, we celebrated it with six very different poets, all published by the small, independent Mica Press. The date was chosen specifically as the publication ‘day after’ of Rosie Johnston’s wonderful collection Safe Ground – literally hot off the press last night. Rosie’s verse, always pitch perfect – whether recounting traumatic childhood experiences or giving wise and witty advice to young women, or describing being up a mountain with her Father or by the sea with her Mother, and later as an adult herself – brings to life her own emotional and physical worlds in an immediately accessible way. The title of her prose poem, ‘Laughing and Grief’, says it all.

Antony Johae’s close encounters with a travelling spider, a Pope, EU officials and his acupuncturist are only some of the subjects of his surprising, often amusing and always honed to perfection poems. His experiences of travel (not as a tourist) are fascinating and brought to life in different forms and meters. His erudition and skill with language and languages come through lightly and fills with wonder his latest collection, Foreign Forays. As a pun lover, the title grabbed me before I had a chance to open the book. But what treats inside!

Like Antony, Michael Vince is poet who has lived abroad and is able to convey his experiences without nostalgia but with affectionate curiosity, making us sit up and observe with him quirky details, whether on a Greek bus or roadside or when trespassing on a film set in Maritime Greenwich, where he now lives. In Legwork, he muses about comfortable old boots that come to the end of their useful life, and same-size, same-model new ones that don’t fit. Will they change to fit us, or have we changed too much to feel good in them? Fishes as metaphors for ideas… and much much more.

To accompany the ‘launchers’, Les Bell, Michael Foley and Nayma Chamchoun also read a shorter selection of their poems.

As well as being Mr Mica Press himself, Leslie Bell is an accomplished poet with an interesting career path and periods abroad. He read very moving poems written, or rewritten, since losing his partner of 35 years. Also, a keenly observed moonlit street, an Essex church (apparently liked by Pevsner) and more, some using interesting rhyme patterns.

Michael Foley, highly admired by the wonderful late Michael Longley, gave us his take on the fall from Eden, or rather, Eden’s fall into a non-paradise state Religion often plays a part in Michael’s poetry but not as you would expect it. A convent in China where dastardly deed occurred, on in his ‘The Sceptic Prayer’. And words danced on the screen (all texts were projected) in his ‘Dance’ poem.

In her kind of smoky voice, her highly rhythmic, slow reading, British Moroccan poet Nayma Chamchoun focused on identities forged by the power of social media, or by the power to resist them. She also writes playfully and seriously at the same time a poem where English poets make an appearance, from Shakespeare to Larkin, via Wordswoth, Browning, Blake, Rossetti, Brooke and Eliot.

I looked up the definition of ‘mica’ and I think it’s a fitting description of this small publisher with flair and talent. The words I’d use are ‘fine, shimmery, with reflective properties’. Long may it last and produce such interesting works.

Many thanks as always to the Library staff, to Mari for her help at the ‘bar’ to all the poets and to those who attended.

Here are the poets’ biographies:

Leslie Bell was born in Scotland and spent his boyhood on Tyneside, in Finland, and in Scotland. While studying in Washington D.C., he came across Dante’s La Vita Nuova and promptly decided to ‘read’ English Literature instead of History at King’s College, Cambridge. His working career has been varied to say the least: he made an educational filmstrip on Elizabethan theatres, sold ice cream, worked as a hospital porter, auxiliary nurse, carpenter and plasterer, potato salesman, English teacher, drama student, printer, bookshop assistant, systems programmer in university web support and e-learning, and support worker with autistic adults. In 2012 Les founded Mica Press & Campanula Books in Wivenhoe, Essex, where he has lived since 1978. At Mica he edits and publishes poetry and non-fiction. His own poems have appeared in many magazines and in the anthology Days begin… (ed. Peter Kennedy, Wivenbooks, 2016). Archipelagos, poems by Leslie Bell, (Mica Press, 2012) is available in paperback from https://micapress.uk/ .

Nayma Chamchoun is a British Moroccan writer, poet and performance poet. Her writing is influenced by her cultural duality. She is interested in female voices in the diaspora communities, the challenges they face within them, especially around the taboos surrounding mental health. Nayma is an active member of London’s vibrant Poetry and Spoken Word community, the international Poetry community online and has performed her work at several Poetry Open Mic events including the one marking Grenfell 5 year Anniversary, Women Writing Lockdown Exhibition at the House of Commons. Her work was featured on West Wiltshire Radio & BBC Radio London several times.

Nayma’s first poetry collection COVID: THE WORDY WILDS OF A MIND UNDER LOCKDOWN was published to critical acclaim in 2022. Her second collection, Saging Not Ageing, was published on June 1st 2024.

Michael Foley is a Northern Irish writer who lives in London, where he worked as a Lecturer in Information Technology at the University of Westminster before taking early retirement to concentrate on writing. He has published four novels, four philosophy books and six poetry books, including New and Selected Poems (Blackstaff Press 2011) and, most recently, a long poem, The Whole Thing (Mica Press 2023). Plenty to read about him and details of all his books on his website michael-foley.net. 

Antony Johae gained a Ph.D from the University of Essex with a comparative study of Dostoevsky and Kafka. His book Franz Kafka, Maker of Dreams will be published this year by Cambridge Scholars. Antony has taught literature in Ghana, Tunisia and Kuwait. He retired in 2009 and now divides his time between Colchester and Lebanon (his wife’s country of origin). Since retiring, he has published four poetry collections: Poems of the East (Gipping Press, 2015); After-Images: Homage to Eric Rohmer (Poetry Salzburg, 2019); Ex-Changes (The High Window, 2020); Home Poems (Orphean Press, 2022), and most recently the pamphlet Foreign Forays: Poems of Travel in Europe and the Med, from which he will be reading at the event. Palewell Press, which specialises in works on refugees, human rights and ecology, will bring out Antony’s prose collection Lines on Lebanon later this year.

Rosie Johnston’s writing spans journalism, drama, fiction and poetry, with novels published in Dublin and London and four books of poetry by Lapwing Publications in her native Belfast. Six-Count Jive (Lapwing, 2019), describes the inner landscape of her complex post-traumatic stress disorder and led to readings at Glasgow and Vigo universities and inclusion in Her Other Language (Arlen House, 2020). Rosie’s poetry also appears in the Northern Irish section of Places of Poetry (OneWorld, 2020), the Mary Evans Poems and Pictures blog and various magazines. Her first prose poem, Laughing and Grief, was published in American Writers Review. Rosie will be reading from her fifth book of poetry, Safe Ground, just published by Mica Press. Rosie reviews poetry for London Grip and is a generous and inspirational teacher and mentor. rosiejohnstonwrites.com

Michael Vince taught in Italy and the UK before emigrating to Greece in 1977 where he worked in language teaching, teacher education, and materials writing.  His son grew up in Athens, and lives there still with his Greek family, so Greece is a large part of his life still, and some of his poems are set there. Michael has published a lot of ELT textbooks of various kinds with Heinemann and Macmillan, and has been a freelance author since 1988. Since returning to the UK in 1994 he has lived mainly in different parts of London, and tends to write himself into anywhere new. He now lives in Greenwich, which features a lot in the poems of Back to Life. Since the 1960s his poetry has appeared in numerous magazines, and his collections include: The Orchard Well, Carcanet 1978; Mountain, Epic and Dream, Hunting Raven 1981; In The New District, Carcanet 1982; Gaining Definition, R L Barth 1986;  Plain Text, Mica Press 2015, Long Distance, Mica Press 2020,  A Conversation with George Seferis, Rack Press 2022, Back to Life, Mica Press 2023, and Legwork Mica Press 2024. At present he is writing poems mainly about Water.

To purchase any Mica books, go to https://micapress.uk/