Stumbling in the Bloom

Winner - Governor General’s Award (2006) The poems in Stumbling in the Bloom engage the ever-present enticements and entanglements of beauty on life’s, and art’s, home ground - in wilderness and garden. But this surprising volume, the finale of John Pass’s quartet of poetry books, At Large, takes intriguing side trips on the home-stretch, including a wry excursion to the chiropractor, a fanciful flight from a student driver’s parallel parking practice, up an Everest in Alberta, and on a singularly moving Canadian journey towards and away from the ground zero of the 9/11 tragedy. The book, and Pass’s aesthetic, come to rest finally on a fulcrum, a paradox, of acceptance: the embrace of uncertainty and unhappy accident that purpose and effort alone make possible.