An excellent article from The Powell River Peak, by arts editor Laura Walz. To read the article in its entirety, click here.

A Sunshine Coast poet has captured Canada's most prestigious literary prize.

John Pass won the 2006 Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry for his latest book, Stumbling in the Bloom

 

 

"I feel very gratified and honoured," Pass said in a phone interview from Toronto just after the winners were announced. "I think this is Canada's oldest and, to my mind, most prestigious literary award. It's a great honour."

One of the opportunities that might open up for Pass with the award is the chance to do more public readings and to be invited to more literary festivals, he added. "I think it is a very important part of poetry to hear it spoken and I'm hoping that I get the opportunity to do more of that."

Grounded in place, with intricately detailed language and a clear voice, Pass touches the universal through close attention to the particular in his most recent book.

Stumbling in the Bloom concludes a quartet, At Large, which began with The Hour's Acropolis, in 1991, followed by Radical Innocence, 1994, and Water Stair, 2000.

Pass started out 15 years ago wanting to work on a larger canvas than he had used previously. "The fall back position of Canadian poetry seems to be lyrical, or narrative based," Pass said. "Much of it is very good, but I wanted to try and do something on a bigger scale."

His approach was "imagining in a foolhardy way that you can somehow encompass everything, if you live long enough and have enough books."

He began with what had impressed him most, the classical world, Christian humanism and the Romantic poets, "which is where I began with my reading and appreciation of poetry."

Stumbling in the Bloom tries to reprise them all, Pass said. "That is what the four sections are all about, loosely. It tries to draw things together on my home ground."

Source: Laura Walz, The Powell River Peak

John Pass was born in 1947 in Sheffield, England and has lived in Canada (in Calgary, Winnipeg, Coquitlam, Vancouver and on the Sunshine Coast) since 1953. He has a BA in English from the University of British Columbia (1969) and teaches at Capilano College in Sechelt and North Vancouver.

Thirteen books and chapbooks of his work have been published and his poems have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies in Canada, the US and Ireland. In 1988 he won the Canada Poetry Prize, an international competition sponsored by Canada/India Village Aid. He has won awards from The League of Canadian Poets, The BC Federation of Writers and BC Cultural Services, and has been nominated for a National Magazine Award. He was Visiting Poet at Brigham Young University in Utah in l990 and a mentor in 1997 at Otherwords, the Writing & Publication Workshops of the BC Festival of the Arts. He was the recipient in 2001 of the Gillian Lowndes Award, given to a Sunshine Coast artist in any discipline at a significant juncture in his career. In April/May 2002 he was in residence at The Banff Centre for The Arts as an editor/mentor to poets participating in the Centre’s Writing Studio program. Since the late 1980’s he has been working on a linked quartet of books pulling the personal into focus through our culture’s largest lenses: classical, Christian, Romantic, and contemporary/existential. The first and third volumes in this series, The Hour's Acropolis (Harbour Publishing, 1991) and Water Stair (Oolichan Books, 2000), were shortlisted for The Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize (BC Book Prizes). Water Stair was shortlisted for a Governor General’s Award.

John Pass lives on 8.5 acres of forest, garden and orchard near Sakinaw Lake on B.C.'s Sunshine Coast with his wife, writer Theresa Kishkan, and their three children. Theresa and John run High Ground Press, specializing in the letterpress printing and publication of poetry broadsheets and chapbooks.

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