Sales surpassed Heather's initial goal; she continues to donate 50 percent of revenue from the sale of each book to Unicef's Gift of Education fund. Heather Grace Stewart (hgrace.com) is an author, poet, and photographer. Her poems have appeared in Canadian literary journals, international anthologies (Routes, Babylon Burning) e-zines, and the British small presses. Where the Butterflies Go is her first complete collection. Reviews:"Whirlwind poetry that never hesitates...always delightful and rarely what you expect. We need poetry like this." —Sally Evans, poet and Editor, Poetry Scotland. "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."—Poet-Journalist Tom Phillips. "These poems have a humanity, a goodness, an almost other-worldliness about them." —Tony... More > Lewis-Jones, Author of Anytime and nine other collections.< Less
"Re: Moving" Now that I am finished reading this book I should give a full review. This is an amazing work. Heather has an ability to bring a humanity to the page like few people do. I read some these poems and it feels like they were written for me. In the early Morning Hush so summed up my own relationship with my Wife, It had me bawling like a fool. She was quite ill at the time and since then we have lost her. Heather;s work has helped me heal a little and keep going and taking care of our son. When I got to Rewind, I saw the last line and it said "I would not change one thing". I thought perhaps, Maybe I would have bought this book a little sooner.
Heather's poetry is inspirational, peaceful, funny and dare i say it.. sane. It's like sitting with a best freind who can put things into proper perspective, and you don't mind that she didn't buy the coffee.
"What Really Matters" REVIEW BY UK POET TOM PHILLIPS 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... More > 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)< Less
"Where The Butterflies Go" 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... More > 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)< Less
"Where the Butterflies Go " 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... More > 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< Less
