Book Review: Butterfly for a Heart by J. Jacqueline

Butterfly for a Heart by J. Jacqueline is a delightful collection of poems and prose that takes us into the various facets of life.

Life As it is…

Our generations will look at us and see fools;

Consumed with a materialistic mind and vulgar thought.

They will erase us from their history of goodwill

and place us in their history of destruction and disgrace.

The collection opens up with the above poem and it immediately casts an impression that deep inside the book there is more to savour and understand and feel within your heart.

Like many other contemporary poem collections, this book too is segmented into various aspects and the poet has placed poems accordingly. Major themes presented in the book are vagaries of life, resurrection, the value of men and women, love and lust, and dark themes like death and hollowness, and more.

Another gripping aspect in the book is its ability to hold aggressiveness with firm intensity. The poems are simple to read and understand, however, at the same time, their meaning says a lot about things that matter and concern us, but we tend to ignore in our day to day life. For instance, in the poem Look and Feel, the stress has been given on change in life for no good reason. People have changed in the rage of the hedonistic chase. Last two lines sum up the disappointment of the poet precisely – The men are no longer men, And the place is a home no more.

The next poem, Lustful Ecstasy is a masterpiece. It has been put in the aptest contrasting way. Lucid yet powerful. Likewise, some poems will tell you about the misdeeds of the human mind in pursuit of desires, while some introduce you to the villainy of the human mind. Not only this, on the positive side, there are poems about grandpa and grandma and loved ones. A few stories are written in loving memory of someone close, who the poet seemed like have lost.

The collection is so powerful that it will leave you with mixed emotions. Don’t hesitate to re-read some of the poems to extract the true meaning and real juice off them. Without doling out much, we can say that the themes in the poems resonate well with the contemporary times and trends, covering joys and miseries of our lives with an artistic stroke.

Just like our music changes as per our mood and situations, you can have this collection to sooth, to look back, to remember, and to see yourself in the mirror. Absolutely, a collection to read and treasure. Good work… J. Jacqueline.

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