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.

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

"Forecast by John Pass, is an outstanding collection gathered together from 20 years of work, 1970-1990."
~Elizabeth Cran, The Guardian (Charlottetown)