An Impact of Butterflies

Beryl Baigent is a poet; her published collections include Absorbing the
Dark, Hiraeth: In Search of Celtic Origins, Triptych: Virgins, Victims,
Votives, and Mystic Animals.

In an age when intellectuality and knowledge often surpass spirituality
and wisdom in poetry, this book is a nature-fresh offering.

The collection is divided into four parts. The author begins by
casting “Spells to catch the light” in “Book One,” and passes,
in “Book Two,” through feminine experience in “The crucible of
love.” In “Book Three,” she rails against the “cruciform,” the
masculine in civilization, and, in “Book Four,” she completes her
spiritual journey when she meets the man “With his sharpened scythe”
and accepts the “Dark Shadow-Side.”

Gordon is a poet who lives by the earth’s cycles, conscious of birth,
death, and all that unfolds between. Her images revolve around festivals
(Samhain, Easter, and Mid-Summer’s Eve), fairies, earth spirits,
ghosts, ancestors, and angels—one of whom is a beloved dead sister who
“haunts” the afterglow of Christmas like a tree needle, “a small
green intruder perfuming the stair.” Each “book” is illustrated
with a window of a shingled “Enchanted Shed,” through which readers
experience the changing seasons and the movement from dawn to dusk.
Black-and-white photographs, some involving composite images, are
juxtaposed throughout.

Gordon’s universe, though spiritual, is also inherently sensual and
sexual. “Skin [is] offered bare to summer / ... To mate with her
spirit’s season / In the kiss of light.” In “Making a winding
sheet,” we are entranced by ambiguity: “All the long night he held
me, / I thought his embrace curved like forever.”

While Gordon transcends human sexuality in her mystical love poems, she
is totally grounded in her ecofeminism. In “The last valley,” she
makes her position clear: “The last valley is held to ransom.” An
environment that once echoed “[s]tealth of fox, ghost of lynx, /
Feather-fall of owl” is now beset with “[s]hadow of bull-dozer,
slice of saw, / Wrenching of tree-fall.”

An Impact of Butterflies is a wonderful book—a book full of
wonder—that reminds us of the importance of awe in our lives.