An Arbitrary Dictionary

Michael Williamson was Reference Librarian at the National Library of Canada in Ottawa.

An Arbitrary Dictionary could have been a total failure on all aesthetic levels: Mr. Pass, with his eyes closed, randomly selected words from the Concise Oxford Dictionary and used them not only as poem titles but also as “complete definition(s) ... in a personal context.” Now, this sort of artistic process is risky business. Poetry usually functions best in an atmosphere of freedom from conscious restraints; indeed, poem titles most often are the result of the poem, not the inductive antecedent of it. Mr. Pass obviously relished the risk, because this entire collection positively bursts with inventiveness and genuine hypnotic power. The book is divided into two sections, “An Arbitrary Dictionary” and “Baby Shouts Dao,” the latter section being a joyous celebration of different types of creation, from abstract imagination to more tangible events such as the birth of a child:

So many of these poems are simultaneously dense and simple in all ways — theme, diction, emotion, kaleidoscopic image, and possible inference:

Mr. Pass’s poems about his children rival the best children poems of Michael Ondaatje and Don Coles for their powerful melding of personal/universal themes. That can be said of the whole book. Mr. Pass’s previous seven collections certainly offered glimmers of poetic brilliance, but this collection is such a stunning success on all counts that it immediately renders Mr. Pass a very important poet in a more public sense. We are very lucky to have this book among us.