Description
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.
About the author
Michael Pacey has been a fixture of Fredericton'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).
In recent years he has produced four collections: The First Step and Electric Affinities (2011 and 2015, both from Signature Editions) and Wild Apples: a Dialogue with Thoreau (Pottersfield Press, 2022). The latter two collections were shortlisted for the Fiddlehead Prize at the annual New Brunswick Book Awards. More than a hundred of Michael's poems have appeared in Canadian literary magazines, and his poems have twice been recognized in the Best Canadian Poems in English series.
