atlas of ordinary things by Melissa Butler

Reading Butler’s poetry, you get a sense of the eternity in the commonplace. It is a meditative poetry devoted to a button, burnt orange, a menagerie of tiny animals, the neglected middle pedal of a piano, the ends of a scarf… Butler’s directive is the clear constant: “Whatever you are doing, wherever you are, stop and notice.” The noticing is inward and always grounded in the material: Ultimately, this noticing offers us a sense of our place in the world.

–Daniela Buccilli, poet and educator

Orange rinds, a grandmother’s hands, cups and bowls – the everyday objects of everyday life – make up much of the iconography of this volume. Yet, there is nothing ordinary about the poems in Melissa Butler’s atlas of ordinary things. In the mode of William Carlos Williams, Butler takes items, exchanges and scenarios out of the ordinary and urges us to regard them with a poet’s eye. A belt loop, a fish circling a bowl, a shopping list … these become departure points for broader meditations, as Butler unravels routine to rediscover the world and our place in it. Butler’s tableaux of domestic life are poetic versions of the still life, brisling with quietude and pathos. A conversation over dinner takes on a new, sad meaning as it is locked in time, and slicing onions, drinking tea, doing laundry become metaphors for loss, change and the passing of time. In contrast, Butler’s imaginings of the lives of animals will take you on journeys to the centre of the earth and at the speed of light. Unlike Ted Hughes, she chooses more modest subjects — the earthworm, the slug, the common house fly — but the worm’s eye view is no less epic. Butler reminds us of how it feels to see the world in a grain of sand. It is as if she makes time stand still.

–Martha Evans, University of Cape Town