The First Step

Michael Pacey is fascinated by the everyday objects which surround us. He evokes the essence of these handy familiars, thus capturing the magic within the fabric of day-to-day experience. The poet looks at these objects from odd angles to first defamiliarize the reader; the objective and the subjective become mutually interpenetrating, there's a reciprocal "opening up" on the part of the poet and his subject. The collection begins by focusing on significant objects in the author's backyard and in his garage: a crowbar, a ladder, a stack of berry boxes, a compost heap, the burrs entangled in his dog's fur. The tour continues inside the house: a pair of gloves, an old pot, an ironing board and medicine cabinet become his muses. Pacey then turns to the tools he uses in his writing room: pen and pencil, eraser, typewriter, drafts, and finally the writer's essential tools -- the words he chooses, (including his signature which stamps these words as his own), and magnifies these words to study their component parts -- the letters themselves: such as X,Y, and Z, Q, and S, before taking us outside again for a detailed study of the language of honeybees and the iconic character of larks, doves and hummingbirds.

These poems seamlessly combine realistic narrative and description with fantasy and imaginative projection. Ordinary places and activities become magically and exhilaratingly strange, revealing depths in the dailiness often taken to be flat or dull. Connections are made between the ordinary and art, between painstaking work and insight.

Michael Pacey was born in Fredericton. He received his BA and BEd from the University of New Brunswick, his MFA, MA and PhD from the University of British Columbia. Pacey's first full-length collection of poetry,The First Step, was published by Signature Editions in 2011; his second, Electric Affinities, came out in 2015. His work has appeared in more than twenty literary magazines, includingThe Malahat Review, The New Quarterly, Exile, Prairie Fire, and Descant. He has also published a chapbook (Anonymous Mesdemoiselles, 1972), and a children's book (The Birds of Christmas, 1987). He was editor ofPRISM International and has taught at UBC and Lakehead University.