Congratulations are in order for our 2016 festival author, John Pass!
John has received the prestigious 2016 Open Season Award in Poetry!
Read the full release on The Malahat Review’s website here
http://www.malahatreview.ca/contests/open_season/2016_winner.html
John will be participating in a poetry reading at this year’s festival on Sunday Feb 21st at 10:45am and will be joined by his partner Theresa Kishkan.
Tickets to his reading are $25.00 and will be sure to sell quickly after this wonderful announcement!
Contact Galiano Island Books at 250-539-3340 to purchase your ticket!
Poetry
Of John Pass‘ winning poem, “Margined Burying Beetle,” judge Russell Thornton says: [The poem] presents a questing biocentric poetic awareness, an intense elegiac tone, and a portrayal in which a creature conventionally conferred little status appears as a potent agent of the creation, ‘a writer of a future’ offering sacred illumination to a shamanistic speaker who witnesses it ‘wondrously / shifting!’ on ‘plush moss’. The play of language in the piece is open and exploratory and at the same time taut, controlled; the poet here utters quick, quirky changes and rich phrases. There is the ‘crabapple / small and scabby of late but in the spring / a clustered mass of port-wine glory above / wild iris.’ There is the beetle of the title, ‘sinuous / wriggler chevroned orange on black’ that ‘nudged / the resurrection’ [the speaker’s] way in sunlight…’ In all its aspects, including complexity of theme, depth of feeling, imaginative movement, and deft lyrical execution, this poem is a marvellous success.
