Poetry
Category: Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 70
ISBN: 9781781727553
Publication date: March 24, 2024
Price: £10.99
Shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney First Collection Prize 2025
“In the end, the theme of this life-enhancing book is not death, but love.” – The Sunday Times
Following her much-celebrated pamphlet, Flamingo, Kathryn Bevis’s debut, The Butterfly House, tells the story of a life before and after a late-stage cancer diagnosis. These poems examine both life and death, encompassing experiences, terrible and sublime, as in her Forward Prize-shortlisted poem, ‘My body tells me she’s filing for divorce’. The collection, divided into two sections, ‘After’ and ‘Before’, contrasts the ghost-train of diagnosis, its spooks and cobwebs waiting at every turn, with all that came prior. Above all, these poems attest to the enduring power of a life lived in gratitude for love.
In ‘After’, poems like ‘Anniversary’ respond to the painful truth of late-stage illness, but Bevis writes with luminance about the reality of living with it, conjuring it through startling and surreal imagery. Cancer is playfully compared to co-existing with a ring-tailed lemur, and stages of loss and acceptance in ‘Translations of Grief’ transform the terminal patient into a shoal of sardines, a zebra, a lyrebird, a blue whale, and a jellyfish. Many poems home in with absolute clarity on what is most important: love, loved ones, and moments of beauty that we experience every day.
In the section ‘Before’, poems about family, culture and growing up are made bittersweet by the knowledge of what’s to come. The poet’s grandmother is knitted back into being, and the felicities and trials of girlhood are figured movingly in poems like ‘How to Choose a Boy’. The complexities of womanhood are explored through cultural icons like Wonder Woman, Gloria Gaynor, or Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman. These are poems that celebrate love and tenderness, which offer freedom and potential, as in ‘Anagrams of Happiness’, where “now is who we might become”.
The title poem is haunted by the butterflies that once appeared to mark the death of a loved one, and now flutter before the narrator: ‘Since my diagnosis, / I see them every time I close my eyes.’ The Butterfly House faces the poignant reality of our allotted time, our span as fleeting as butterflies – ‘Their flaming wings. Their too short lives.’ Through remarkable and stunning metaphors, Bevis beautifully holds together the fact of mortality with the joy of being alive.
Kathryn Bevis
Kathryn Bevis is Former Hampshire Laureate and Founder of The Writing School Online. Her poems have appeared in journals and magazines like: Poetry Review, Poetry Wales, Poetry Ireland Review, Magma, Wasafiri, The London Magazine, and Mslexia. Her poem ‘My Body is Filing For Divorce’ was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem (Written category) 2023. Her poems have also been awarded a Hosking House Trust Residency, won the Wales Poetry Award, the Crysse Morrison Poetry Award, and the Second Light Poetry Competition, and co-won the Mairtín Crawford Award for Poetry and the Poetry Society Members’ Competition.
Her debut pamphlet Flamingo, published in October 2022, was named as one of the Poetry Society’s ‘Books of the Year’ and shortlisted for the Saboteur Award for Best Pamphlet. Her debut full collection, The Butterfly House was published in March 2024.
Photograph by Tina Norris Photography.
“Kathryn Bevis’s début poetry collection, The Butterfly House is an extraordinary achievement.”
Nigel Jarret, The Lonely Crowd
“The poet’s almost forensic curiosity in embracing her experiences during her time left results in poignancy at its highest level, with poems keenly crafted with masterly line-breaks and form… Bevis’ death is a devastating loss, but she has left us these poems. Read them.”
Alchemy Spoon
“Kathryn Bevis blazes with a defiant, irrepressible zest for life, a hunger for learning and a commitment to writing on her terms, in her way, in a voice that is utterly contemporary.”
Tessa Strickland, The High Window
“Kathryn Bevis’s The Butterfly House has an arresting theme: The poet’s diagnosis with terminal cancer… frank and funny about imminent death…. The Butterfly House seeks to take flight from pain into art… In the end, the theme of this life-enhancing book is not death, but love.”
The Sunday Times
‘The Butterfly House is an explosion of a book, crammed with bright imagery, experimental form and surreal backflips. Tiny clockwork hearts rub against parties at the end of the world. Bevis takes her place as one of the most interesting and vibrant poets of her generation. Superb.’
Joelle Taylor
“Accessible, engaging, and intelligent, with rich seams of heart and humour… Bevis is her own original voice… she is amazingly imaginative, with a pen that’s fine yet full of flair, resulting in poems that are lively, clever, compelling, and often quite surprising… Bevis is a fearless writer, tackling some big, spiky subjects, yet writing with wit, skill, and ease.”
Mab Jones, Buzz Magazine
“Kathryn Bevis writes visceral, moving, sharp-eyed and formally adventurous poetry, often focussed on the embodied experience of women’s lives. Only a writer of considerable gifts could repeat the trick so consistently.”
Don Paterson
