The London Magazine Editions is delighted to present the fifth collection from critically acclaimed poet Maggie Butt, Degrees of Twilight.

The passage of time is tangible in Maggie Butt’s fifth collection. These poems use history, memory, work and travel as lenses to examine the inevitable pains and sharp pleasures at the heart of our transient lives.

Maggie Butt is a poet who writes with elegance and wit, skill and sensitivity: her new collection offers the reader powerful insights into our twenty-first century purposes and predicaments.  Time, work, birth and death; love and loss; the essentials of human experience are here. 

More alert than many contemporary poets, she is also haunted by a disturbing awareness of lurking danger, ‘a cliff edge in the dark’; by the frailty of the human condition, and by its pathos.  There is wistfulness as well as courage.  RV Bailey

Maggie Butt’s poems focus, with clarity and humour, on the past’s strength, the present’s warmth and on all our futures: tender and apprehensive, as briefly glimpsed as twilight.  Alison Brackenbury

This is the poetry of simultaneity, of synchronicity, as multiple pasts, presents and futures co-exist in the same poems… Jonathan Taylor

Read a poem from the collection here