If the speaker of Van Gogh’s Grasshopper were a Biology teacher, his students might call him “a crazy guy” or “an original dude.” His obsessive enthusiasm for insects would fill the classroom to all its corners. Minutiae he shares—“A ladybug’s flight wings / are four times her size,” “walking-stick love-making / can last a world-record of 79 days!”—would entertain and perhaps shock them. Laughter would ripple down the rows as the unconventional teacher talks excitedly about insects dancing, and mimics their motions with a few steps of his own: “How to do the June bug: / it’s all in the abandonment—/ with one beat, back on your heels, then twirl on two.”
The keener readers in the class, the future English majors, would get a kick out of Spacey Pacey’s puns (butterflies as “buddha-flies”; “Legs poised, precise, pacey”—a self-reflexive pun if there ever was one); alliterative extravagances (“meticulous motility / of multitudinous appendages”); other sorts of verbal hi-jinx (“There are no ants in Antarctica”; “Scattering the categories, / the scattegories); rhymes (“sleek, slick / as silk; unwrinkled / as milk”; “[crickets’] cry of love a ticket / to the frontiers beyond banality”); playful anthropomorphism (of a female Praying Mantis about to devour her mate, “her withering glance says, ‘So long, stud … Life’s a riddle—/the answer is death’”); contemporary diction (“Studies show female roaches / prefer toned-down mates—nerds and geeks” ); sexual joking (the just-mated, ill-fated male Black Widow Spider is “Laid, / and laid out cold, simultaneous”); and comic anachronisms (“that honeybee booty-waggle / they say Aristotle used to bust out / at Lyceum sock-hops long ago”; “you may recall the Beetlemania craze / all over the UK—crowds of kids / following them.../ Darwin, an undergrad at Cambridge, caught the bug”). Some days the students return home telling stories of their lovable, eccentric teacher—one intoxicated not by booze but by insects.
“Pacey’s poems are spoken by someone who has delved into scientific studies and draws upon decades of living and observing and reading.”
After his wide-ranging collections The First Step (2011) and Electric Affinities (2015). which demonstrated much wit and observational precision, Michael Pacey published Wild Apples: A Dialogue with Thoreau (2023), an experiment in exploring the great nineteenth-century writer and naturalist’s journals to generate layered reflections on many aspects of the natural world. In a sense Van Gogh’s Grasshopper, a gathering of fifty poems about insects (plus arachnids and worms), seems an outgrowth of the Thoreau project, but here Pacey has honed in on one branch of nature’s vast tree. He acknowledges in a poem that his curiosity about insects began in childhood (“My parents predicted a career in entomology”) and a few childhood memories of insects encounters crop up (helping kill a cutworm in the family garden, feeding houseflies to a Venus Flytrap), but mostly Pacey’s poems are spoken by someone who has delved into scientific studies and draws upon decades of living and observing and reading.
The first poem in Van Gogh’s Grasshopper, “Mayfly,” is one of its finest, but not typical of the book, in that it chooses concentration and economy (one sentence and three fragments) over expansiveness and charming digressiveness. It’s an apt opener, in that it deals with an insect that lives for no more than a few hours, and the poet extends an invitation to his readers: mayflies’ ephemerality prompts the lines “so welcome them / when you may” (“may” being the first of the book’s many puns), and the advice about welcoming the Mayfly is aligned with a welcoming to us, with a sort of address also found later in the collection.
Not only does the poet acknowledge readers; more than once he cites acts of writing, no more explicitly than in the ending of “Entomology:”
I am secretly writing a book of insect poems, scribbling away in the dark, all alone— diligent ant, patient spider, surreptitious wasp.
The poet imagines himself as insectoid, as hardworking and indifferent to attention—even if there will be irony in the private act losing its secrecy through the public act of publication.
That Biology teacher is in love with language, not just tiny critters, and he explicitly revels in the bond between entomology and etymology. If English and Latin generally dominate Pacey’s nomenclature, in “Naming the Butterfly” he draws upon more than fifteen languages from assorted cultures and continents. Pacey shares his delight that one German name for butterflies translates as milk-thief, and, in another poem, that Latin name of the Pine Processisonary Caterpillar stems from the Greek “thaumatos, / for ‘miraculous’ or ‘object of awe.” In “Naming the Butterfly” he drolly undermines our desires for onomatopoeic naming: “If it’s their droll flight we want to act out, / enunciate with these noises we make,” and different languages see and hear differently: “in Hebrew parpur, Papuan fefe-fefe / and Basque, tximeleta.” Besides being a student of insects’ physiques and behaviour and of human language intersecting with them, Pacey is drawn to books about them. At times the poet is on his hands and knees, in household rooms or outdoor places, getting his hands dirty; at other times, he’s holding a book, nose to words about beetles or flies: “Mulling this motif, I turn the page / and sure enough, the Wandering Spider / appears.” The collection’s second of three sections, “Possessed by Insects,” highlights Pacey’s reading, and offers narratives about Descartes, Darwin, Fabre, Nabokov and others encountering insects. The unimaginable range of insect species means that someone can spend as much time learning about them second-hand as by turning over rocks, peeking under bark or casting nets about.
My commentary on the collection has given an overview; another discussion could examine poems in detail, an approach bound to honour the strengths of craft, of stanza-building, transitions, the beginnings and endings, of specific poems. Be assured there is an abundance of such strengths in Van Gogh’s Grasshopper. In its embrace of earthly details and its wellspring of humour, at times it reminds me of Bruce Taylor or Don McKay. The poems naturally aren’t all of equal freshness and appeal; a few times they might rely a little too much on the fascination of the presented facts—yet the poet’s savouring of those facts is infectious. Also, how many readers, in going through an insect-rich collection published in 2024, will feel the absence of ecological crisis, of acknowledging stress from diminishing insect populations caused by insecticides, other pollutants, draining of wetlands and climate change? Some readers (and poets—think of McKay) find it hard to ignore the fates of swallows, flycatchers and other insect-reliant birds.
If Van Gogh’s Grasshopper might be questioned as the creation of a cheerful, positive disposition, its exuberance, diligence and attentiveness to detail are significant virtues, as is its artistry. Its curiosity and praise are qualities desperately needed at this time when Earth is so threatened by indifference and hostility. We can read the fifty poems as supporting the belief, expressed in the title of a Don Domanski poem, that “biodiversity is the mother of all beauty.”
About the Author
For several years Michael Pacey, who has lived most of his life in Fredericton, lived in Vancouver, completing an M.F.A. in Creative Writing and a PhD in English, and editing Prism International. He has published a chapbook and four collections of poetry, and a picture book for children. Two of his poems have been chosen for the Best Canadian Poetry series of anthologies. In the spring of 2025 Van Gogh’s Grasshopper was honoured with the Fiddlehead Poetry Prize.
About the Reviewer
Brian Bartlett’s many chapbooks and collections of poetry include Granite Erratics, The Watchmaker’s Table and, most recently, The Astonishing Room (Frontenac House, 2024), which was short-listed for the Al and Eurithe Poetry Prize. Based in Halifax/Kjipuktuk since 1990, Bartlett has also published three volumes of nature writing and a gathering of his prose on poetry.
Book Details
Publisher : Pottersfield Press
Publication : Sept. 2024
Language : English
Print length : 98 pages
ISBN : 978-1-990770-55-5