I got about 20 pages in and started having trouble reading. You bring so much feeling to the page. So called Ecstasy did me in for a while. You have what some people would call an Old Soul. You have a perspective on things that someone as young as you are usually doesn't have. Where the butterflies go is about the same size as Mitch Albom's Tuesdays with Morrie. I sat down and read that straight through. There is no way I could do that with your book. after I finish each poem, I have to sit back and let it settle into my mind. Each page is very thought provoking. Some are more difficult than others. In The Early Morning Hush was hard because my wife has been hospitalized for a while and I miss her. Thank you for making me think about how lucky I am, To have someone I have had that kind of connection with. Some people never do. Thanks also for making me appreciate her even more than I already did.

Best $20 I ever spent. Except for our Marriage license fee.

I was The First one to Purchase the Autographed Version of My Best Friends Book Here in the United States.

Heather is a remarkable Poet with a lot of promise.

Her inspiring poems will have you becoming part of the story. Her on the edge talent will have you begging for more . I cannot say enough about this book and the author except I love Heather Grace Stewart and her Marvelous Book Where the Butterflies Go.

Thank you for sharing this with me.

Doc

I really recommend this book to anyone who wants to enjoy reading good modern poetry. There are many funny and deep observations contained within these pages to bring the reader back for more. I was impressed by the poets sense of empathy and sensitivity for those less fortunate, and a willingness to confront her thoughts and feelings on many different topics. The book is divided up into three sections, Pain, Growth, and Family, all three subjects are dealt with humorously, and compassionately. The reader is given a keen insight into the many influences that have shaped her life, and some tragic events of recent times are explored intelligently. I liked the way that she quite often has a great line or two buried in each poem, and it's great fun just digging out those little gems, such as, "The great oak sways proud, stand high,/Then paints its final will against the sky/That is how I wish to live, and how I wish to die". I do find myself returning often to this book, to just pick out one or two thought provoking or even funny poems, and for the joy of sharing the authors thinking and observations. Half of the proceeds of this book will go to UNICEF, so it's for a great cause, and it's a lot of fun to read! (Graham West)

Kathryn McL. Collins

Pathos, wisdom and humor are keynote to the poetry written in Where the Butterflies Go. Kudos to Heather Grace Stewart, with appreciation of her poetic prowess throughout the pages of this book. An apt review appears already, perhaps unwittingly, in the final poem of this superb collection, her last two lines:

“I would not change
one thing.”

”Rewind,” the poem from which the above lines are taken, addresses the musings of many a reader. Would we, if we could, relive our pasts? Our poet’s choice is never. A commentary on life worth living, life worth saving and life worth accepting; butterflies are evident throughout.

Ms. Grace Stewart writes with slipper soft directness on the spectrum of universal experiences: joy, tragedy, tenderness, callousness, fear. Who cannot smile at the humor and poignancy of her thoughts on love, marriage, pregnancy, motherhood and family? Her comments on mindless action, “people rush to get to where ever they don’t want to go,” bring knowing nods and touching melancholy. Through an impeccable choice of phrasing and simple vocabulary, Ms Stewart records the fragility of living, the fleetingness of time and the necessity to be present in each moment of every day. As she says, “There are no ordinary days.”

Each poem and idea appearing in this work is worthy of comment, however to understand the delicacy and wisdom of her talent; one must savor every verse personally. Heather Grace Stewart will speak to you, soul to soul, as:

“the returning geese
called out to us
like old friends,
leading us home.”

U.S. Poet Kathryn McL. Collins’ collection No Need for Breadcrumbs is at Amazon.com
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1905202180/ref=pd_po_rvi_1/103-7708909-2914212?%5Fencoding=UTF8&v=glance&n=283155

Arranged under three broad headings – ‘Pain’, ‘Growth’, ‘Family’ – Heather Grace Stewart’s Where The Butterflies Go gets at the nub of what it means to try and live in a world which appears to be passing by at an ever more astonishing speed and where what’s pumped out through TV and computer screens seems startlingly at odds with both the realities of ordinary, day-to-day existence and our more humane impulses and aspirations. It is a book of illusion, disillusion and, as it were, re-illusion, an acknowledgement of loss and the discovery of fragile compensations. The great risk for poetry like this, of course, is that it can come across as rather naïve, the losses too easily overcome, the compensations too easily found. That’s certainly not the case here. Thanks to an exhilarating directness and a worked-for simplicity of language, not to mention a nicely self-deprecating sense of humour on occasion, this is a book full of sharply drawn images, honest poignancy and frank admissions.
Take ‘Golden Dreams’, with its refrain of ‘Durango gold, Durango gold’ alluding to the Colorado gold rush and, by implication, the consumerist dream. Here, on a home-improvements shopping trip, Grace Stewart is overwhelmed by a different sort of ‘rush’, one of harsher realities: “We choose ceramic tiles/content,/while war rages/over the ocean,” she writes, with a telling nod at childhood song (“My bonny lies over the ocean”, too), before admitting, with an almost brutal honesty: “We care, but still go about our lives.” Only, of course, she’s not letting herself off that lightly – there’s homelessness, a government dedicated to preserving the status quo… By the end all that’s left, it seems, are “dark clouds/across this Canadian sky”.
The causes of such disillusion seem legion. There are poems here about the 1989 Montreal massacre (when fourteen women were gunned down at the Ecole Polytechnique), child-soldiers in Sierra Leone, disenfranchised women in Iraq, 9/11, beggars, poverty, domestic violence, divorcing couples, and a child mown down by a speeding driver. In the ‘Pain’ section of the book in particular, it seems a bleak, broken and violent world where the only option appears to be to “forget about/the fragile parts/and go on surviving”.
Grace Stewart, though, doesn’t forget those “fragile parts” – love, empathy, hope – and refinding them occupies the remainder of the book. In many ways, this is about celebrating simple, mostly domestic pleasures - the sight of bulbs in the garden coming into flower, the “butterfly kisses” of an unborn child in the womb, that child’s first steps, an embrace, “the shelter of my lover’s arms”, “the melting days” at the end of winter – but always with a persistent sense of their fragility and a refreshing down-to-earthness which locates these moments in the context of dirty washing, internet pop-ups, torn umbrellas and other irritations which “just won’t matter/100 years from now”.
In ‘My love picks me plums’, for instance, she accepts “bushels and bushels of dark juicy fruit” from her husband on her first anniversary, only to remember to “file this moment away in my mind/for some day when, in heated argument/I wish to throw plums at him”, while in ‘Forecast’, the hope she finds “hanging in the air” after a storm is simultaneously “just within my reach;/just outside our window”. Such ambiguity gives these poems their strength because ultimately these are restorative acts, finding and preserving moments of tantalising hope, sifting what really matters from what doesn’t and holding on. (Tom Phillips)

"I have just read Where the Butterflies Go, and I am converted to Heather Grace Stewart. Her extraordinary simplicity and directness may cause a raised eyebrow or two among the pedantic, but on she goes confidently towards the future, buoyed by her political intensity, her humour, her true feminism and her ability to select and record. It's a whirlwind poetry that never hesitates because it is always moving to the next thing it is going to say, which is always delightful and rarely what you expect. We need poetry like this." - Sally Evans, editor, Poetry Scotland.