Forecast - Couverture souple

Pass, John

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1550177311 ISBN 13 : 9781550177312

Editeur : Harbour Publishing, 2015

Synopsis

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.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

John Pass's poems have appeared in magazines and anthologies in Canada, the US, the UK, Ireland and the Czech Republic. He is the author of nineteen books and chapbooks, most notably the quartet AT LARGE, comprised of The Hour's Acropolis (Harbour, 1991), Radical Innocence (Harbour, 1994), Water Stair (Oolichan Books, 2000)--shortlisted for the Governor General's Award--and Stumbling in the Bloom (Oolichan Books, 2005)--winner of the Governor General's Award. His most recent collection, crawlspace, published by Harbour in 2011, won the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize in 2012. He lives with his wife, writer Theresa Kishkan, near Sakinaw Lake on BC's Sunshine Coast.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Harbour Publishing
• Date d'édition: 2015
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1550177311
• ISBN 13: 9781550177312
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 144
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible