The Butterfly Hotel is an anthology of poems that revolve around the themes of identity, loss, nostalgia, and affiliation. This particular compilation of works is segmented into three distinct parts with each part dealing with themes relevant to a particular season of the poet’s life. All three segments are united by the motif of the monarch butterfly. The author makes use of the insect as a metaphor for himself, seeing parallels in the creature's migration patterns in his own literal and figurative life journey. The first segment deals with his life as a migrant English citizen, centering on his experiences as a long-time resident of Brixton. The second segment involves poems that discuss his experiences of having moved away from his native Trinidad to Great Britain, and the third and last segment of the collection features poems that speak wistfully of his experiences when he finally gets to revisit his home country and he recalls his youth.
The first segment of anthology is a collection of poems describing the daily comings and goings of the inhabitants of Brixton, his current residence for some years now. The author presents his observations of daily life within their community, both light and mundane, such as the appearance of the women that frequent the area, or the discussion topics of the men or dark and ominous, such as when he talks of the criminal, more sinister happenings such as when he dedicates a poem to the gangs of Brixton—groups of young men prone to erupting into violence.
The second segment details the author’s migration to Britain. Here, he discusses his early days as an immigrant and how he equates that experience as one having been exiled from his birth nation. His poems capture his culture shock and sense of alienation he undergoes during his first few months of adjustment to his new life—and to a certain extent, his new identity—in Britain. The poems in this segment he makes heavy use of metaphors, such as thrift shop jackets and, again, the butterfly, to clearly express these emotions of estrangement and loss.
The third and last segment talks of the author physically returning to the place of his birth, much like a long overdue pilgrimage. In addition to being physically present in Trinidad as a grown man, he interweaves the experiences in his youth with the current Trinidad that he is faced with; as such the poems featured in this segment are heavily tinged with nostalgia and colorful local elements as he reminisces about the past. In this segment, similar to the first he balances happy, youthful recollections specifically tied to the place such as the food he ate and some unique characters he encountered growing up with mentions of the dark and troubled past of his birth place such as marks left by colonizers and the slavers and the gang activities that plague parts of the country.
The Butterfly Hotel overall, is a deeply personal poetic journey that talks about his sense of loss for the Trinidad of his childhood, his life as migrant where he struggled to find not just a new life but a new identity, and how he eventually makes peace with those two facets of his identity. Moreover, it is a panoply of colorful observations and musings of daily life in the multi-ethnic melting pot that is modern Great Britain.
