Review of Death and the Butterfly by Colin Hester
Most often, poetry and fiction are distant cousins. They study one another approvingly, but follow very different migratory patterns. When the two stray into each other’s domain, more than territorial squabbles can arise. Each can — with considerable ease and deftness — dispatch the intruder’s feeble flight into their well-worn net. Despite their common ancestry, the webbing connecting the two is fragile.
It is into this turbulent air that Colin Hester’s novel Death and the Butterfly (Counterpoint Press, 2020) navigates — quite literally, as it begins in the cockpit of a German Dornier 17 bomber. It begins in the 40’s, but the novel spans multiple time periods from the War through to the last decade. It does so in zig-zag fashion, so much so that one wishes for more from Table of Contents than the I — II — III section groupings offered. And fasten your seatbelt, as some of the jumps in chronology are 4 decades or more in either direction.
Not only is there a poet in the flock of characters (one Alexander Polo), but this poet’s travels put him in touch with RL writing programs and produce chatter between Polo and at least one RL living poet/critic, William Logan. References to other writers pepper the novel: Neruda, Dylan Thomas, James Wright, William Harrison, even landing upon the lesser known U of Montana local William Kittredge (who died after the novel’s publication).
At the end of the novel, as if yielding to the awkward juxtaposition of these two disparate flocks, the poetry reader is rewarded with an “Addendum” containing 19 poems. The poems, mostly four-line stanzas, include at least one, “I Do Not Love You,” which is feathered into the novel. It begins:
I do not love you like deserts love the night
or rivers love the fealty of their banks.
I love you like violins love windows
that open onto orchards and pear blossoms.
I love you how the knees of the earth
sink with certitude into their beddings
of mole tunnels, rose thorns, butterfly wings,
feeling the soft yield and crisp bite of marsh nights.
It closes with
I love you with the blood of my future;
I love you with the slow flame of my past;
I love you because I cannot remember
how not to; how to creep past your silence,
the steeples and fingers of your hands
calling out, beckoning, pleading for deafness.
Only rarely does the novel strive for this tone, especially not in its dialog, which takes a more equatorial route. Still, along the meandering flight plan of this novel one does encounter “Alas, no opiate exists to dull the pain of foresight — that of loss to come — and he could see how much her eyes ached, ten-fold more than the besieged tissues of her flesh.” And hear “. . . till end of days her gasping last breaths, her clutching at the short months of life here on earth, the clear echoing note of your unremitting anguish.” And, contemplating the gravesite of Neruda and last wife Matilde Urrutia, “. . . sand so immaculate save for a single dome of green dianthus that couches by the headstones like a charmed hedgehog and at the foot of the graves by the flowing lips of sweet william so pink they might yet be kisses.”
Prospective readers must accept the premise that at least one consequential apogee in Death and the Butterfly occurs at a poetry reading. That this category of event, significant mostly to the literati and aspiring but unpublished poets, should occupy such a prominent waystation in the flight of the novel, says much about author Hester’s compass. Wherever his gaze falls — upon England’s wartime king, on infant, on politician-wife, on bomber pilot or Lockerbie’s savagery of death from above, the butterfly soars undiminished, most likely concealing its poet’s plumage:
Suzanne, where are you? I mean, years from now
as you read this? For yes, we dead are flightless,
without shiver or heat, yet our hearts —
empty as footprints — still crave what has been.
Do you stand on the sly carpet of gill
in your greenhouse, its panes caulked with menace?
Or do you stroll your high gardens, this page,
torn like a butterfly, on your sleeve?
