Van Gogh’s Grasshopper

Michael Pacey

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ISBN: 9781990770555

Van Gogh’s Grasshopper

  Author:   Michael Pacey    
  Publisher:  Pottersfield Press

Van Gogh’s Grasshopper is a collection of fifty poems about insects and other very small creatures. Each poem focuses on particular aspects of a specific tiny life form: their name and what it means, their overall design and structure, the superstitions we have about them, and their particular strategies to survive. The book is bound together through this narrow focus and the result is a most unusual and fascinating collection of poems.

Females are dominant in this insect world, and that crops up again and again; male insects are so unnecessary that we think of many such creatures as inherently feminine. The poems also take a look at insects and sex (their mating rituals), insects and death, dancing, music and insects, insects who shared extraordinary and little-known relationships with famous historical people (like Van Gogh), and the work of great naturalists and entomologists. Here are odes to insect beauty, the amazing feats they perform and their ultimate mystery.

Pacey writes in the footsteps of other great men who have studied and documented these so familiar yet strange creatures before—Vladimir Nabokov, Paul Brooks, Jean-Henri Fabre, Charles Darwin, C.J. Jung, René Descartes, and Baruch Spinoza.

Details and Specs
ISBN associated with this title: 9781990770555
Item PC0378
PublisherPottersfield Press
PublisherPottersfield Press
Published on September 15 2024
Language ENG
Pages 110
Format Paperback
Dimensions8.5(in) x 5.5(in)
Shipping weight(g)
Status NOT YET PUBLISHED

Michael Pacey has been a fixture of his hometown?s literary scene for more than fifty years, publishing his early poems in the Fiddlehead while still in high school, and his first collection with New Brunswick Chapbooks while a sophomore at UNB. He did his MFA in Creative Writing at UBC where he served as editor-in-chief of Prism International (1984-85). He continued his studies at UBC, earning an M.A. in English and a PhD specializing in Canadian literature; his doctoral thesis was a critical edition of the 727 letters between Desmond Pacey and Irving Layton. In recent years he?s produced two collections: The First Step and Electric Affinities. More than 120 of Michael?s poems have appeared in leading Canadian literary magazines, and his poems have twice been recognized in the Best Canadian Poems in English series.