The Feathers of Butterfly

In a search for timely peace, The Feathers of Butterfly: Poetry of Life, Light, and Brokenness is a rush journey into the wildness and dark corners of human souls.

Steve Anc observes nature through poetic eyes and has seen social unrest, imbalance life, lack of brotherly love, the quest for God, the doubt and quest in human souls, the unfulfilled dream, the unfulfilled love, the broken thoughts; and through deeply personal reflection has traced a path from bitter history to the current predicament.

He has drawn a canny connection between the uncertainty of nature and the long arm of humanity, with reconciliation of conflicting thoughts; and this collection offers reconciliation and preparation into hopeful destinations from our current climate of clustered thoughts.

In The Feathers of Butterfly, Steve mines into the deep sacred of ancestors through the living world and raises his unique poetic lines for the world to see.

What People Say

Steve Anc’s collection The Feathers of Butterfly is at once filled with beautiful imagery and contains quietly devastating lines such as, ‘the ashes of our home will remain.’ Steve Anc writes with a kind of hard-won wisdom that is not all that common these days. Many of the poems have a proverbial and universal quality that is mythic in scope. In the poem ‘To my brother in the sea,’ we find the line, ‘No man sails without tales.’ Steve Anc is a poet who appreciates the power of a story told well.

There is further wisdom expressed simply and clearly in the poem ‘The Girl That Doesn’t Wear Slippers,’ where we find the universally truthful observation that ‘freedom comes with envy.’
This collection performs what poetry does best of all the forms of creative writing: expressing multitudes of experiences and emotions in just a few lines. In ‘My Letter to the Lady Bianca’, we are given the following lovely lines:

Where your smile will serene the sky.
Where we could live for the moment,
And do the things that come to mind.

Living for the moment and learning from interactions with the world around us are recurring themes in this collection. The poet introduces us to learned figures such as ‘The man who understood privilege.’ This mythic character ‘sings the joy of the earth’, and ‘knows the tolerance of time’. There is a consistent sense of universal truths expressed with the warmth of heart and considerable artistry of expression in this collection.

In poems like ‘Ode to Greedy, Steve Anc assumes the voice of the wise old sage when forensically exposing the nature of one of humanity’s worst traits: ‘Naturally susceptible, wicked but weak.’ Again, the cumulative effect of these poems is that we are in receipt of privileged insights from wise and experienced voices who know something of the world. This collection is not only enjoyable but also nourishing. Take the final stanza of the poem ‘The mountain you climbed’, for instance:

But life is a passing shadow,
And all things have a cycle;
Even the slowest snail had climbed,
And the fainted strength had risen;
Because after the destruction, rebirth.

There is such a pleasing sense of perspective to the above lines. They capture the essence of a collection that will delight fans with beautiful images and well-chosen wordplay but will also provide reassurance and generous wisdom in uncertain and often scary times. I highly recommend The Feathers of Butterflies. - Henry Wright, United Kingdom Author of the novels ‘Myself am Hell’ and Summers Ending’