One of Canada's most respected poets strode confidently to the podium Monday night, June 20, to launch his latest collection of poems, crawlspace, at the Sunshine Coast Arts Centre in Sechelt.
"John Pass is our poet," said his introducer, Dick Harrison. "He settled into the landscape, lived and worked here."
Pass lives in Pender Harbour, and this recently released collection is published by the hometown publisher, Harbour. It's Pass's first real collection (other than chapbooks) since his 2006 offering, Stumbling in the Bloom, for which he was honoured with a Governor General's Literary Award and earned a trip to Ottawa to receive his recognition. Not too many poets can say on their curriculum vitae that their work has appeared on the Parliamentary Poet Laureate website.
Harrison gave a clue to understanding the author's work when he reminded the audience that a crawl space in a house is a place to check your footings. This was borne out in part by Pass's own testimony. A theme that snakes like a vine through many of the poems is that of renovation, now that he is in his 60s.
"I'm rebuilding all that stuff I originally built in my 30s," he said, and echoed this thought in the poem, A New Footing: "I've had in my head some weeks the imaginary line/square-rule timber framers work from in a beam's heartwood"
Past themes recur in this book, and there is also a wonder in things new: an observation of a child at play, now that the poet's own children are grown up, is found in the poem, Laszlo Loves Erasure. There is also a fascinating new project based on the work of artist Ernie Kroeger, who has taken transcriptions, or rubbings, of the devouring pine beetles' progress through lodgepole pine. Kroeger asked that writers translate his transcriptions from "beetle" into English. Pass took on the challenge and produced Anthem, a grand poem with echoes of our own national anthem.
Harrison's observation that these poems are a little more accessible than prior work would appear to be true, at least in the first section, entitled Endless Street. Pass opens playfully with the poem Mews (or does he mean muse?) that describes a "warm wee pinkish pouch of need," possibly a kitten. This theme evolves in the second section into the piece Muse in which he explores the "elephant monolith" of the unmade poem.
Geography is prominent in this book. One of the first poems that Pass read at his launch was entitled Trail and Medusa, a piece that describes the serendipitous Sechelt location of the "log-cabin crucible," the very Arts Centre from which he has launched many a book. There's talk of having a framed copy of this poem hanging in the gallery - a great idea that serves to root Pass even deeper in his community.
One thing though - there will be no bronze bust of the poet mounted in the Arts Centre's garden as he suggests, tongue in cheek, in the poem. Even if he is highly respected, his legacy will always be in the words, not the monuments.
Crawlspace can be found for $18.95 at Coast bookstores.
