Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Lipstick by Maggie Butt
(Greenwich Exchange, 2007)

In a seven-part sequence in Lipstick called ‘Gap Year’, the poet reflects, after seeing her daughter off on her journey:

     you turn towards the tube’s wide mouth 
     descending to the hot re-breathing air, 
     knowing how simple it would be 
     to ride the escalator into Hades’ flames 
     if you had just a whisker of a chance 
     to bring her back with you.

To be able to fuse Greek myth and the tube in a way that makes both more fully apprehended, and do it in a convincing speaking voice – that’s poetry. This is a book held together by a love that spreads out in concentric circles from family through friends and acquaintances to strangers and animals, and has as its other side an anger against drudgery, time, death, ugliness, macho militarism, and the profit motive when it overrides humanity or a precious environment.

The title poem celebrates the women who wore, and wear, redder lipstick in war time, “to tango in the pale-lipped face of death.” It is part of the affirmation of this poem to include without strain so many shades of red – scarlet, carmine, vermilion, cerise, ruby. It’s another part that it has footnote adducing evidence – from a war photographer in Bosnia and Max Factor’s records from WWII – that its thesis is rooted in fact. Lipstick not only ranges across but makes present the breadth of life in our globally interactive age, and the history of ordinary people in recent generations; especially in the way they endured wars and privations and creating value in such things as allotments, jumble sales and the contents of a mother’s button-tin.

The first poem, ‘Stonemason’ sets the book’s parameters in several ways; it will range through time, be generous and diverse in its empathies, and include meditations on art. This mason has outgrown his desire to shine, “content to find the faces in the stone” of the roof which others may never see, carved into likenesses of people he has known. There follows an evocation of women in 1978, including the poet, saving “a Himalayan forest from being cut down for tennis rackets” (another footnote). Then poems about a woman in a Hopper painting, an anorexic (painfully ironic title: ‘Girl Power’), a stigmatised ‘Fish Wife’, a war bride transplanted to foreign wilds, a hijab-wearing critic of western undress. There are evocations of the author’s youth, working life, travels. But as vivid as anything is the depiction of life for her parents’ generation, and further back still:

     Mum’s button tin held her world war
     carved quiet in black Bakelite,
     and older pearlised, horn and jet
     cut from rag-thin frocks of grandmothers

     whose lives were darned by gas-light
     raising sons to fuel the great machines of war,
     buttoning their great-coats
     to walk the long walk out of sight.

Late on in Lipstick is a poem called ‘Bulbs: for a scientific daughter’:

     I defy you – take the spiralling DNA of me 
     the pumping, whooshing ventricles, 
     the zing-charged porridge in my head 
     and show me where I keep the love for you 
     that will outlast my life.

To respond to this, you don’t have to believe that love literally outlasts life (the “defiance” is the more moving because the poet isn’t conventionally religious). You do have to recognise the passion and commitment, at the heart not just of this poem but of the volume, and the way it emerges strengthened, if anything, from taking on all that intelligently popularised science, whooshing and zing-charged. Lipstick is a good deed in a naughty world, shining out, with a desperate courage, like the bright lips of women in war-time.