The Hour's Acropolis

Product Description


The Hour's Acropolis, John Pass's tenth book of poetry, is a classical meditation rebounding between domesticity and myth. Ben Johnson's Olympic disgrace is counterpoint to poetry's inspirational lightning, Steve Fonyo appears next to Odysseus, Orpheus listens to Lou Reed.

Stylistically, this book is a complex and ingenious construct, a poetic acropolis posing as a "deconstruction" of a one-page introductory thematic motif "poem." A pair of sonnets address each other over the heads of intervening poems. A haiku sequence, acknowledging influences beyond the European, is called upon to perform the very western task of narrating a storm. Pass's virtuosity, his "technical and intellectual brilliance" (
Canadian Literature) offer shelter and welcoming affection in love poems like, "Delicious," "Quibble" and "Our Daring."

The poems in
The Hour's Acropolis are the work of a mature poet with a range, ability and intelligence rarely seen in contemporary poetry. John Pass is one of a small group of writers who belong to no identifiable school of fashion but who works in a steadfast faith to the shining moments, "the wild light alive in the fibers striving."


About the Author


John Pass's poems have appeared in magazines and anthologies in Canada, the US, the UK, Ireland and the Czech Republic. He is the author of nineteen books and chapbooks, most notably the quartet AT LARGE, comprised of
The Hour's Acropolis (Harbour, 1991),
Radical Innocence (Harbour, 1994),
Water Stair (Oolichan Books, 2000)--shortlisted for the Governor General's Award--and
Stumbling in the Bloom (Oolichan Books, 2005)--winner of the Governor General's Award. His most recent collection,
crawlspace, published by Harbour in 2011, won the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize in 2012. He lives with his wife, writer Theresa Kishkan, near Sakinaw Lake on BC's Sunshine Coast.


Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.


Surprised

Apex, high anchor
of an April sky mishandled
so to splash the night, sans moonlight

upon us freely to the lees -
well never see, listing

in frog pause, steep Chablis
of Narcissus sleeping nearly

how our wonder is undone, unravels
aimlessly
how we've lost

you, locating Leo.
Or one said, "Ride
the dipper. It's nothing,"

and then above the racket
of the ratchets clacking
under our ascending car, peak

of that propelling climb
"You're gonna die."
But didn't.

But done before we knew it. And hard
on the heels of mesh and meld
weld personal
a cooling song

of all things wants apres

delirium
her rudimentary handle on
the far light, its libation.




Us in Everything

What to make of light
is issue

against the nay-
-sayers, turners-away
but for them at length

who swim too in its puzzlement

raising their glasses
into its assurances, modest vocabulary

of qualities in and around and upon
definities of objects and ethers, clarities

of isolation

but of itself
what is it, despite our successes

aslant here in the tulips, there
in the white flash blindness

commencing and concluding the opened
atom's invitation? Some simple telling

image drowns
in any human eye for it, a smile's
infusion, eddies of pollen
on the windshield

signals the singular singing again
of the invisible making us see and seen.