John Pass Forecast

Annotation

Forecast recovers early out-of-print work by Governor Generals Award-winning poet John Pass. The poems engage potentialitiestravel, an orchard he cares for, evolving relationships, house-building, becoming a poet and husband and father. Theyre 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 premonitionsdislocation, environmental damage, poetrys shift from modernism to postmodernismare 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 Pounds translations / of Rihaku are still there days later when the tree outside blooms, concluding: Only beyond / in the garden, that canopy // of fragrance, arts / complement: coincidence. // Friends, come home. / There is everything. Any fashionable irony is tempereddispirited 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 sequences experimentation foreshadows Passs expansive work in his later quartet, AT LARGE.