• Age: 16
• Grade: 11

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.

John Pass’s poems have been published in Canada, the US, the UK, Ireland and the Czech Republic. He is the author of twenty 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. crawlspace, from Harbour in 2011, won the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Forecast: Selected Early Poems (1970–1990), appeared in 2015. He lives with his wife, writer Theresa Kishkan, near Sakinaw Lake on BC’s Sunshine Coast.

John Pass' profile page

Crawlspace

The poems in this book are, for the most part, approachable and inspiring. Very much a BC book, subjects include a piece written from the point of view of the pine beetle and a meditation on the sparrows that nest in the rafters at YVR. A poem that recalls the poet’s father uses the action of mowing the lawn as the trigger for his memories: a device that may be of interest to young poets. A work of art by Ernie Kroeger is reproduced in black and white. This serves as companion and inspiration to the poem “Anthem.”

Pass won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry for his last book, Stumbling in the Bloom. Many elements of this book could be used in creative writing sessions —whether writing from art, creating a “translation” or writing a poem inspired by the work of another poet.