Butterfly Wings


Poetry - General
162 Pages
Reviewed on 08/01/2021
Buy on Amazon

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    Book Review

Reviewed by Vincent Dublado for Readers' Favorite

A deeply personal and emotional work, Butterfly Wings is Kasthuri Packiyanathan’s anthology of poems divided into three sections of love, pain, and believing. A job that began when the author was facing one of the most difficult challenges in her life physically, the experience also took its toll on her mental and emotional well-being. The thoughts and experiences that she shares in her verses serve as her path to healing and rebuilding. In the author’s own words, it is her outlet toward self-relief, and she hopes that her poetry could help you recuperate if ever you are facing significant personal adversity. Butterfly Wings is poetry therapy at work. As the book’s title aptly suggests, you may well find yourself getting out of your chrysalis, spreading your wings, and starting to fly.

Kasthuri Packiyanathan’s poems are imbued with the spirit of her feelings. It is a collection that has great depth and is a tool for personal healing. It contains verses that sum up the gamut of her emotions. In one of her works, called First Love, her earliest recall of unconditional love was maternal love while gestating in her mother’s womb. It has an emotive suggestion about nurture, and her expressed difficulty in putting her mother’s irreplaceable affection into words makes it all the more moving. Her style defies the conventions of writing mechanics, doing away with capitalization like Edward Estlin Cummings. It gives her work that raw feel, and it works. As the psychologist Martin Seligman proposed, psychological well-being consists of PERMA: positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment. Butterfly Wings is well worth reading for its PERMA factors and beyond.