A Hundred Poems About Flowers – the first twenty-five by Robyn Marie Butt
ISBN: 978-0-9918552-4-7     $22.95

With her debut book of verse, A Hundred Poems About Flowers: the first twenty-five, Robyn Marie Butt turns her powerful lyric gaze on the so-called “humble” matter of flowers numerous. While flowers have real sensuous value as living things, yet hold many symbolic meanings for humans, a writer could go in plenty of directions considering them. And this is the generous tack that Butt takes. These poems are luscious in detail yet mostly delivered in a colloquial voice. They are wise and smart. They are sometimes sad and frequently witty. These are poems of a numinous spirituality.

A Hundred Poems About Flowers – the next twenty-five by Robyn Marie Butt

Boularderie Island Press
ISBN: 978-1-926448-07-7   $22.95 With The Next Twenty-five, Butt’s poems reflect two groups of flowers: common English garden blooms, and lesser known, often hidden, wildflowers increasingly endangered by corporate agriculture and suburban sprawl. Lyrical, thoughtful, and frequently witty, and infused with a numinous spirituality, her work lifts a colloquial voice honed in rural Southwestern Ontario to celebrate our human relationships with blossom.

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A Hundred Poems About Flowers – the third twenty-five by Robyn Marie Butt
ISBN: 978-1-926448-13-8     $22.95

For the third instalment of her poem-and-audio collaboration with Southwestern Ontario painters, Robyn Marie Butt looks at two flower workers from history: eighteenth-century English gentlewoman Mary Delany, originator of the art of collage; and twentieth-century British physician, healer, and mystic Edward Bach, creator of the Bach Flower Remedies. Engaged, insightful, and wryly humorous, here Butt’s poems explore the eternally rich subject of flowers through one artist’s life and one healer’s work until the poems become a form of thoughtful journeying. Butt’s surprise destination is a place where compelling resolutions appear in the little, overlooked things – things that gall us or keep us going, and turn out not to be so little at all.

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A Hundred Poems About Flowers – the final twenty-five by Robyn Marie Butt
ISBN: 978-1-926448-29-9      $22.95

In the fourth and final volume of her poem-and-audio collaboration with Southwestern Ontario painters, Robyn Marie Butt looks at flowers as metaphor – living energetic imprints that intertwine with who we are and who we may become. In these poems, flowers sum up relationships to self and others; become emblems of struggle or survival; offer a breath of resilience from another dimension. Flowers act as secret guides for the experiencer alone; as rebel companions, flouting solitude’s conventions. Yet Butt also examines flowers as abused for the current social lie only to open back that lie and lay it out for dissection. Somehow the bloom itself floats free, transformative energies intact – an invitation anyone can follow into new and better worlds. For this final volume, Butt has done the paintings herself.

By times compassionate, brave, and humorous, this bright and poetic collection roams from a little country girl to the urban party crowd, from rural teenagers’ drunken exploits to a Trappist monk – culminating in a connected series of longer stories about Beatrix Chambers, a young artist learning about love, aging, and most of all, about the meaning of family. The extended portraits of Bea’s stays at home, and her experiences of parents, grandparents, siblings, and cousins, are as flawless as crystal and as soothing as summer light.

Sample Robyn Marie Butt reading poems from The Next Twenty-Five below.