The Gibsons Live Poets Society presents a reading by Joe Denham and John Pass on Wednesday, Oct. 21, at 7:30 p.m.
Denham read from his new collection, Windstorm, and Pass will read from his award-winning book, Stumbling in the Bloom at the Gibsons Public Library.
Windstorm is a passport to the place where chaos and form meet; Denham's timeless ethereal gaze is rooted in the mastery of poetic forms such as the sonnet and Dante's terza rima. These quiet, forceful poems explore heaven, earth and sea with arresting images, ideas and words. Like the wind, Denham's poetry has the power to move.
Denham's first collection, Flux, was published in 2003. He is a poet with an international scope, having been anthologized in Open Field (New York), New Canon (Montreal), Jailbreaks (Ontario), Breathing Fire 2: Canada's New Poets (B.C.) and In Fine Form.
He works as a fisherman and lives with his family in Halfmoon Bay.
The poems in Stumbling in the Bloom engage the ever-present enticements and entanglements of beauty on life's and art's home ground - in wilderness and garden. The book and Pass's aesthetic come to rest on a fulcrum, a paradox of acceptance: the embrace of uncertainty and (un)happy accident that purpose and effort alone make possible.
Pass was born in Shef-field, England and has lived in Canada since 1953.
He has a BA in English from the University of British Columbia (1969) and teaches at Capilano University in Sechelt and North Vancouver.
Fourteen books and chapbooks of his work have been published, and his poems have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies in Canada and abroad. In 1988 he won the Canada Poetry Prize. He has won awards from The League of Canadian Poets, the B.C. Federation of Writers and the B.C. Arts Council and has been nominated for a National Magazine Award.
Pass lives near Sakinaw Lake with his wife, writer Theresa Kishkan.
- Submitted
