crawlspace

crawlspace is John Pass's first volume of poetry since he won the Governor General's Literary Award for poetry in 2006.

John Pass moves effortlessly from ruminations on the beauty of our earth and our relationship to the environment, to the capricious nature of the muse, to signposts of the human condition: love and loss, aging, and relationships between parent and child. His poems are often grounded in specific places and experiences, travelling from the urban setting of Toronto's Bloor Street, with its ". . . rough
wind in the empty elms rolling/ into the streets the liberated beer cans" to a North Vancouver landscape and its "...seams of grey on grey, sea under sea mist" to the bucolic "...golden light in the bunch grass and aspens" of Pennask Lake in BC's Okanagan.

Pass's intelligent and compassionate vision stretches out before us, encompassing human frailty, memory, and our relationship to the natural world. "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 has published over sixteen books and chapbooks, including his quartet of books titled AT LARGE: The Hour's Acropolis (Harbour), Radical Innocence (Harbour), Water Stair (Oolichan)--which was shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award--and Stumbling in the Bloom (Oolichan), which won the Governor General's Literary Award. He has also won the Canada Poetry Prize, the Gillian Lowndes Award, and has twice been shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in magazines and anthologies in Canada, the US, the UK and Ireland. John lives with his wife, the poet, essayist and novelist Theresa Kishkan, near Sakinaw Lake on BC's Sunshine Coast.