New Releases by John Pass

Beginning where he left off in crawlspace with “the little start I’m given, giving, that May be,” John Pass’s new poems articulate further entanglements with stasis, purpose and hope. He struggles as we all do under the weight of a world imperilled by climate change and environmental degradation. And the poems, characteristically alive with attuned observation and emotional honesty, glimpse unsettling limitations to our consciousness and conscience. This is particularly so regarding animals in the book’s central sequence, “Creation of the Animals.” Historically and geographically expansive, This Was the River is nonetheless approachably human. “Margined Burying Beetle” (winner of the Malahat Review’s Open Season Award in 2016) is an astonishing homage to the poet’s mother, one of several pieces touching upon grief and loss. There are joyous poems, too, for the births of his grandchildren, and slyly humorous asides on medical test results and poetry prizes. Pass’s affection and sorrow for the natural world is at the book’s heart, and as a whole This Was the River confirms his reputation as a poet of lyrical eloquence, masterful technique and both intellectual and emotional range.

Forecast recovers early out-of-print work by Governor General’s Award-winning poet John Pass. The poems engage potentialities—travel, an orchard he cares for, evolving relationships, house-building, becoming a poet and husband and father. They’re grounded in place and time, but attuned, as he says, to constancy. Those for his young sons are poignant with the perilous hope of new parenthood: “asking courage of me / as never I needed nor knew it in sorrow.” Darker premonitions—dislocation, environmental damage, poetry’s shift from modernism to postmodernism—are mitigated throughout by the subtlety and solace of attentive expression. In “Apple,” Pass “contrives” to suspend time so that “Friends in the kitchen / re-reading Pound’s translations / of Rihaku” are still there days later when the tree outside blooms, concluding: “Only beyond / in the garden, that canopy // of fragrance, art’s / complement: coincidence. // Friends, come home. / There is everything.” Any fashionable irony is tempered—dispirited and optimistic. In “An Arbitrary Dictionary,” random words are selected to become poem titles, idiosyncratic definitions. Surprising complexity and insight often spring from their funny and irreverent first takes, as in “Tuck”: “No life for a fat man / with that once merry band gone wan / on a diet of personal aggrandizement / and Perrier.” The sequence’s experimentation foreshadows Pass’s expansive work in his later quartet, AT LARGE.

The poems in crawlspace, John Pass''s first volume of poetry since he won the Governor General''s Literary Award in 2006, work within the narrowing passages imposed upon us by the inevitable strictures and limitations of living and experience: aging, love and loss, tightening or unraveling family ties. Close to home as always, in one instance literally under the house he has built, Pass''s work is grounded too in the wider world. Travelling from urban Toronto''s Bloor Street, "...a rough wind in the empty elms rolling/ into the streets the liberated beer cans" to the bucolic "...golden light in the bunch grass and aspens" of Pennask Lake in BC''s Okanagan, to Sainte-Chapelle in Paris with Matisse in mind, he never loses sight of the roughly textured physical world where he has found poetry''s footing for four decades: What of the salt-leaching stone beneath the fresco''s lustrous skin, and the unconditioned air outdoors, alive with showers and traffic splashing where we an hour ago these centuries later came in? Pass''s intelligent and compassionate vision encompasses human frailty, memory, and our wondrous, fraught engagements with (and within) nature. "The long view''s our forever/ human incongruity in landscape, on earth. A given,/ the distance. And a gift, to stretch us--restless reaches along the road." crawlspace is a gift that expands the landscape and sensibility of Canadian literature even as it celebrates the intricacies of self.

"Here there''s a sense of testing, of vigilant unease, that sharpens the work. Pass''s poems draw you past their opalescent linguistic surfaces to a passion that''s variously joyous, musing, or gruff." -Books in Canada

Shortlisted for the 1993 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize ...One of the finest poetry books of the year. -Books in Canada