Thank you, dear readers. Through sales of ‘Leap‘ in March 2010 alone (its first month out there in the world), I was able to donate to Unicef’s Gift of Education program, and we sent another child to school. But so much more could be accomplished, and it doesn’t take much. Please share with others your love of the books “Where the Butterflies Go” and “Leap.” Together, let’s send 
many more children to school. As my daughter said when she first started walking: Go, Go, Go!
Best wishes always, Heather
‘Leap’ by Heather Grace Stewart “engages, entertains, enlivens.”
‘Leap by Heather Grace Stewart (ISBN 978-0-557-29619-4)
Review by UK Poet Tom Phillips (Various Artists)
Following on from 2008’s Where the Butterflies Go and to some extent picking up some of the threads and moods from that collection (and, indeed, the odd poem, such as the elegantly fragile ‘Forecast’, itself now cast in a new light by one of the poet’s own photographs), Heather Grace Stewart’s Leap contains poems which are simultaneously sparer, richer and more diverse. Here, again, the essential drama is between the ordinary daily routine, when ‘there are/deadlines to meet,/bills to pay,/diapers to change’ (‘Coping’), and the extraordinary ‘other’ which both haunts and tantalises, the poetry finding its occasion in the unexpected emergence of the latter in seemingly simply everyday situations. In ‘Offline’, for instance, an ice storm ‘slowed us/for a few short hours’ but also keeps back the world and its routines so a couple can talk and listen ‘like it mattered/like hearing our own eulogies//and the minutes melted into hours’, while in ‘Progress’ a woman caught up – and dissatisfied – in the hurly-burly of instant, demanding, virtual communication ‘texts and types/Tweets and Skypes//then sleeps outside/where stars and/fireflies decorate the/infinite darkness.’ Tellingly, perhaps, ‘coming up for air’ is one of the phrases which echo from one poem to another: the moments isolated in the poems, whether they be a chance encounter (‘Paths’) or a parachute drop (‘The sun-filled sky says, “Brilliant!”/while the wind whispers, “Fool!”’), become restorative acts.
That this should seem such a strong theme in the book is, perhaps, at least partly down to the inclusion of Grace Stewart’s photographs. These, too, by definition, ‘capture’ the moment, their clear, sharp aesthetic providing, not mere illustration as such, but a visual commentary, a heightening of atmosphere, as in the shot of a barn beneath an immense expanse of sky cut only by a single jetstream or the layers of fading blue, like a Rothko painting, in a picture of a lake and landing stage. Photographs and poems don’t always make the happiest of bedfellows, the one making the other too explicit, narrowing down rather than opening up potential meanings, but here the A4 format gives the images plenty of room and they enrich rather than detract from the experience of reading.
All of which, perhaps, is to overlook other crucial aspects of Grace Stewart’s writing: its directness and its humour. As well as the poems which are, as it were, attending to transcendence, there are those which dryly, drolly comment on the foibles of the internet age –in particular, Facebook and Twitter addiction, and, as the title of one piece has it, that ‘New Poetic Genre: The Status Update’. ‘If he were living today/would Shakespeare/use Facebook?’ muses Grace Stewart, postulating such poetic ‘updates’ as ‘Will Shakespeare can see a dagger before him’, while ‘one smart old man’, a sort of virtual Humbert Humbert, transforms himself into the ‘charming and wise’, double-d-cupped ‘Lolita’, and, in the self-explanatory short, ‘140 characters of less’, the whole Tweetocracy collapses into a satirical slogan the marketing department almost certainly won’t be plagiarising: ‘I’m bored, I’m bitter, I’m on Twitter’. On the other hand, too, this more direct, more performative style leads towards other, more serious themes, such as post-9/11 anxiety and the detachment of the almost mythical political world from the one which the rest of us inhabit – ‘one hand’, after all, really can’t ‘hold the weight/of the world.’
Ultimately, in fact, you could say that this collection embodies a similar recognition: poetry, too, can’t hold the weight of the world but it can, as it does in these accomplished but unforced pieces, engage, entertain and enliven. (Tom Phillips, Various Artists)
Leap is available here
Ready, Set, Leap!
Leap, my latest collection of poetry and photographs, will be available for sale (print or download) in March 2010. Just like with my last collection, half the proceeds from sales will go to Unicef’s Gift of Education project to help give a child (or, hopefully, several children) the educations they wouldn’t otherwise receive. Donations to this project also help fund a teacher’s salary for a year. Please order an autographed copy now by writing me at writer@hgrace.com to arrange for an inscription and shipping to your home.
Scroll down for a link below, where you can join my blog network on Facebook, and/or search my full name and “Canadian Poet” on Facebook to join my Facebook group. Thanks so much for your interest in my work.
“Sometimes, you just have to take the leap, and build your wings on the way down.” —Author Kobi Yamada
“What Really Matters” — Review of Where the Butterflies Go
I just realized I’ve never posted a review of my poetry collection here on my blog.
It’s been almost a year since its release, and thanks to your kind interest, I’m very close to being able to make a third donation to third-world educational projects. What a thrill to have exceeded my goal like this. Once a few more books are sold, I will donate to Unicef’s Gift of Education fund for the second time. So please consider the book as a possible Valentine’s or Mother’s Day gift, and tell your love or your Mom that half the proceeds go to helping a child get an education they otherwise may never receive. I am happy to ship autographed copies if you contact me, just drop me a comment here so I know you’re interested.
UK poet Tom Phillips kindly took some time to review my collection when it was first launched. I would like to once again thank Tom, Tony Lewis-Jones, Kathryn McL. Collins, Sally Evans and everyone else who has dropped by and reviewed my book on the Lulu web site for taking the time to make such thoughtful critiques. What a year it’s been!
Where the Butterflies Go by Heather Grace Stewart
http://www.lulu.com/content/1506907
* * * * * * 6/6 stars
by 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 acknowledgment 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)
All I Want for Christmas…
The greatest lesson I learned this year was that I don’t need great power or money to make a difference in the world. I can use my talents to help others. I got a much greater reward than any award or sum of money simply by learning how children in the third world have benefited from the donations I’ve been able to offer Unicef and Grace Educational Trust School.
Thanks to your interest in my poetry collection, I’ve surpassed my goal of being able to give a child in the third world the Gift of Education for a year. In addition to that Gift, I recently donated money from the proceeds of my book sales to buy bed nets to help children avoid malaria, and just bought a child the Gift of Play. A lot of children have never seen art supplies or a jump rope. Shouldn’t every child in this world know what it is to create and to play?
Earlier this year, thanks to an interview I did with Neelima Pratap for one of my magazine articles, I discovered a wonderful school in Goa, India that is in its beginning stages and needs financial help so the children can have supplies, desks (they currently sit on the soil to study) and a larger room to serve as their classroom. After I donated to Unicef, I was able to donate proceeds from WTBG to Grace Educational Trust School to help them out a bit with the construction costs for the chairs and desks. I hope with Christmas sales and throughout 2009 I can continue to donate to both Unicef and Grace Educational Trust School.
I am still committed to donating half the proceeds from sales of Where the Butterflies Go to third world educational projects, even though I initially said I’d just try to fund one child’s education for a year. I didn’t want to stop at that once I realized how many lives could be touched with the small donation each book sale offers. I want to keep going, and I hope you’ll help me by buying the book for Christmas gifts this year; Mother’s Day gifts next year, or just for yourself. That’s all I want for Christmas!
People of all ages and backgrounds enjoy my poems – there really is something in this collection for everyone, so it makes a great gift for that person who seems to have everything. You can read the reviews here: Reviews of Heather’s poetry collection. This is also the spot where I’d prefer you buy the book, as Amazon takes a heftier royalty, leaving less for me to donate to Unicef. Just a request 🙂
Autographed copies are available by emailing me at writer@hgrace.com. I can ship the signed book to you once I receive payment via Paypal. Unsigned copies are easily bought via lulu.com as well as amazon sites internationally.
It’s been such a joy to receive notices from Grace School updating me on the school’s progress. Recently, the school’s small staff organized a Children’s Day at the school. The children had never seen party hats or favours before, and were so excited to receive the simplest things most of us take for granted, like pencils and erasers.
Pencils and erasers. I’ve learned through my involvement with Unicef and Grace Educational Trust School this year that the simplest, most seemingly insignificant gifts can give children in third world countries a sense of well-being, self-worth and pride. Those are the gifts I can’t wait to give this Christmas.
Order unsigned copies of my book here and receive them in time for Christmas: Where the Butterflies Go
Signed copies ordered through me before Dec. 15 should also make it in time for the 25th!
Learn more about Grace Educational Trust School through a CBC special here Giving Hope).
Gifts of Magic are a great stocking stuffer idea – see more about Unicef’s Gifts of Magic here).
Heather Grace Stewart 