Forecast: Selected Early Poems (1970-1990)

This retrospective of Pass's early career serves best as an archival piece. (His more recent Stumbling in the Bloom won a Canadian Governor General's Award.) Though the collection selects the best found, inspired, free verse, and more structured poems from several of Pass's chapbooks, it is an excellent example of what's wrong with portentous poetry that seeks to wield weight and import. The personal reflections on Pass's experiences and family are like looking through a plate glass window: readers are welcome to observe but never to engage. The text is inviolable. Even the notes on the work are hopelessly mired in internal conversation. In an afterword on the section "An Arbitrary Dictionary," Pass writes of a way to read and engage the book, but he presents not a dialogue but a monologue: "The method's reward is in the rich complexities luck and accident lend to language, in the possibilities for responsive and responsible play." With the foregoing as perfect exemplar of the whole, setting alliteration and rhythm aside as possible engagements, the writer cannot expect an audience to care about his meaning if his self-congratulatory approach to explication, let alone the poems themselves, amounts to narcissistic verbiage. (Dec.)