Radical Innocence

Roger Nash is a philosophy professor at Laurentian University and the
author of Night Flying.

In his latest collection, John Pass is concerned with basic forms of
trust that shape our lives for better or worse. A number of his finest
poems re-vision religious concepts; for example, prophecy is not mere
prediction, but strives to keep alive a hope-filled amazement at the
allegedly commonplace. In several more, a landscape becomes a spiritual
“inscape,” in ways reminiscent of Hopkins’s religious sonnets. In
others there are striking examples of sense and form mutually shaping
each other; for example, the dry tone of an Eliot-like abstraction may
suddenly switch to a series of dramatically brief images that present
resolutions, or a line may meander like the trailing vine it imitates.

However, the collection is uneven. At its best, the lightning change
characteristic of analogies can shape sense startlingly, as when the
poet compares himself first to a prophet and then to a salmon. At its
worst, analogies seem to flicker by as though one were channel-surfing
on TV. And sometimes Pass merely says what the sense of a poem is,
rather than doing the poetic work of creating that sense line by line.