Can anyone these days live in paradise without cynicism? Paradise is popularly conceived as perfection and since post-moderns consider perfection to be either boring or unachievable, the Adam or Eve role is bound to be a charade.

John Pass, who lives and writes in an Eden called the Sunshine Coast, achieves the delicate maneuver of writing about beauty and happiness without irony or certainty. "My peace falls / into place near perfection, is nearly there. And I would be the poet/ Of those places wholly. I would give them away/ in restlessness, rest, to have them certain./ Certain? That one thing or the other? No!/ Subtlety, shading is the tang.";

It's not all sunshine in the garden and wilderness. The contentment is shadowed by atrophied friendships, back injury, virus infection, rot and decay, kids leaving home, kidney stones, depression and anxiety (the cure for which: chopping firewood in the presence of an amiable dog.) A long poem about the Twin Towers (a Canadian perspective) is not out of place here yet Pass tempts the reader to believe that "a wondrous life"; is still possible. We are invited into "The huge and intractable beauty ... " "where it's always the first day of summer."; His lush, tumultuous and immoderate lines echo the piled upon pile layers of the rainforest's particularities. Beauty, "complete, complex aloof and lightfooted"; has been Pass' theme in many books. After decades of gazing and recording, he's still in an ecstatic state of grace because paradise is not primarily a physical place but the ability to remain in the paradoxical tension of happiness and uncertainty.

The wisteria's "off-hand fragrant gesture,"; "the duvet of November fog those mornings/ light seems to push from within/ the downcast leaves, their brasses/ and umbers gleaming";; these are not greeting card, bucolic images because the copious language is inventive often quirky. He's no minimalist. His more is more. Gulping life, "sun-stunned and song-prone,"; Pass is over-the-top goofy at times but never predictable. Writing well about place depends not on conveying its familiarity but on uncovering its unique angles, strangeness, namelessness. Some of these poems are incautious even excessive; the reader is carried along on a stream so enticing that coming to the book's end is a let down.

The believability of this poet's fulfillment is that he doesn't second-guess it. Pass, stumbling in the bloom, is man besotted with a particular place, a possible Paradise.

by Hannah Main-van der Kamp