Habitat of Home

Product Description


Michael Colby's poetry deals with universal themes of loss and desire, of family and home, in this collection that spans 50 years of creativity. The numerous illustrations are also his. Most were done expressly for this volume, while others date to the 1970's. “My poetry is a simple, solitary expression couched in a metaphysical language which escapes preconceived notions found in common language. It is written as a cadence of music, a harmony of sound to express thought and emotion in a delicately balanced form that brings out the intense passion and emotions of the words. It is a language of harmonic prayer, which speaks from soul to soul and transcends explanation, logic, and rhetoric to communicate almost in spirit language.”


About the Author


Poet and artist Michael Colby was born in Damrascotta, Maine, in 1949 and raised on the family farm outside Wiscasset. He started writing poems and drawing in high school. He briefly attended art school but didn't like its emphasis on abstraction. After graduating from the University of Maine, he lived for two years in a California commune before entering the teaching profession in Salt Lake City. He moved to Pennsylvania in 1979 and eventually co-founded the Hermitage, a Harmonist spiritual center. He retired from teaching in 2007 and since then has devoted himself to painting and poetry. "I am New England born and carry within myself a solitary, cold sense of being like a frozen January day where I tread in silence through life, the only sound being my muffled footsteps through the snow. I have always preferred the written word as it allows in a moment a trackless vista of vision and sound."