Creatures of Air

About the Book

About the Author

David Spooner has lived in Dunfermline, Scotland for the past 25 years. He has served on the National Biodiversity Committee for Scotland, and was recently an adviser to the US Fish & Wildlife Service in the successful rescue of the El Segundo blue butterfly at the dunes by LA airport. Founder of Butterfly Conservation East Scotland, he has had two major books published: The Metaphysics of Insect Life (1995) and The Poem & the Insect: aspects of twentieth century Hispanic culture (1999). One of the things he is arguing in all his writing is the way insect processes - particularly metamorphosis - are much more crucial to human thought than evolutionary theorists have accepted up to now. We have been stuck at the fact of the evolution of the human from the ape, but I am interested in the influence of the metamorphic principle upon human creativity. In his previous books, The Metaphysics of Insect Life and The Poem & the Insect, David Spooner has set out his conception of the human species as dangling between ape and insect. In this book his personal life meets his ideas on the future of homo sapiens, and the outcome is a dramatic poetry.