BLUE BUTTERFLY
By Virginia Love Long
Chiron Review Press, 702 N. Prairie St., St. John, Kan. 67576-1516, 1999, $10.95

More than 20 years ago I had the privilege of meeting (then reading with and later dueting in published books) a writer rooted in a patch of North Carolina known as Hurdle Mills. Her writing remains the most skillfully soulful I’ve ever read. Her volumes and chapbooks continue to expand my world and that of all her fans for even longer.

"Blue Butterfly" is her latest flight, again hauntingly soaring, aesthetic and elusive as this title, symbol of pervasive and transcendent spirit that rises above the nature of human as the humanity of nature.

Virginia Love Long is an old soul, even older than the languages and cultures of her lifelong studies: Nahuatl, French, Russian, Spanish.

She writes of and about her immediate family, that is ours: animals and birds; loves and parents lost along with Lord Byron and other poets (Emily Dickinson, etc.); her sisters, her sons, herself. She addresses current political and social issues with universal poetics, i.e. "open letter to the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives, USA Congress" in "Enough Already!!"

…we Americans are closet Puritans, never happier

Than when chastising a public sinner…

In "Prayer for Kosovo," she notes, "…This is an ageless exorcism: tribe against nation…/I would hold them/At bay, buying you time to run hide in the pines."

There is a conversational tone, inimitably lyrical and unpreachingly prophetic, as piercing as "Opening Day of Doe Season:"

The dead doe sprawls sideways in the rusted truckbed.

…I stand in the rain,

Still cannot spill out for you or any god

Just which is water and what tears

Scalding my face.

The title poem, "Blue Butterfly," is the song of the seer who longs for a place beyond sacrificial suffering. "Something is wrong here where I am no,/Where all earth flowers die and your songs are forgotten."

Still, the resilient butterfly alights on anyone she chooses and thus immortalizes the little girl Ashley Rose in "Meadow Song;" "Flat River Horse Farm:"

A precious site, fresh spring waters with sprigs

of wild mint adorning either bank.

In "I Remember You" Nikita is her Slavic muse, "myth, folk tale, oral history, sometimes Firebird/…Baba Yaga’s brother…/Far from the lush banks of your native Volga."

Images resound sonorously in Long’s poetry and as naturally as the wings of her nom de plume "Mariposa," for she is the wanderer rooted to her region and yet always in flight via a worldwide correspondence that is limitless. "48 Spruce Street," a paean to Thomas Wolfe is resplendent homage to the poet’s major influence.

Elm leaves, drying, dying, whisper in knee-deep heaps.

Familiar territory now, old homeground. I know where I stand.

I move out, make tracks, never looking back…

Virginia Love Long is one of the major contemporary poets of this century whose work will be read for many years beyond the future.