cart
a solid debut
Much contemporary poetry is contemplative and even a little self-absorbed. By contrast, Newfoundlander Randall Maggs has made a powerful and moving book out of the life of Terry Sawchuk, the great NHL goaltender of the 1950s and '60s.
Maggs teaches at Memorial University in St. John's, and Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems (Brick, 224 pages, $20) is his second book. Lovingly and obsessively researched, it reads like a combination sports bio and Greek tragedy.
Sawchuk is a fascinating character. We see him in his inarticulate moodiness, his alcoholic and womanizing self-pity ("the black hand's gloom"), but also in his heroic element as an incredibly durable and perceptive athlete.
Maggs shows us how Sawchuk, a Ukrainian-Canadian from Winnipeg, was able to think with his body. His body took ferocious punishment over a 20-year career. One of the included pictures of Sawchuk's face shows seams from the hundreds of stitches where pucks and sticks damaged it in the days before goalies wore masks:
"He knows this all too well, the breath on his face, the loop of thread and tug at his flesh."
Nightwork, with its extended prose passages and long-lined, pulsing free verse, is as riveting as a novel can be. It's a tour de force that uses the techniques of lyric poetry to go beyond the genre's limitations.
Toronto writer Jacob Scheier's first book, More to Keep Us Warm (ECW, 82 pages, $17), is another twist on lyric conventions, this time in the confessional direction. It's a solid debut.
Scheier opens with a co-translation (along with Manitoban Di Brandt) of a Rilke poem which ends:
"But God himself comes and stays awhile
When the world of torn and cut people starts to humble him."
Scheier's sensibility is that of a shy standup comedian with an unusual interest in religious studies. He's often funny:
"I am lying here waiting for an assassin with the wrong address or something heavy like love or a piano to fall on me."
Although Scheier risks stylistic flatness at times, what's impressive is his directness and insight:
"Sorry it took me so long
to understand an apology
like winter is mostly
a description of absence."
Alison Pick's second collection, The Dream World (McClelland & Stewart, 98 pages, $18), is elegant and gracefully written.
"At midnight, the sun is a showgirl in sequins,/ too drunk to drag from the stage..." she begins in Departure, but ends more quietly: "Our terrible, dazzling falling."
Currently a Torontonian, Pick repeatedly demonstrates her ability to find the apt metaphor or turn of phrase. She's so comfortable with the argot of the lyric and so accomplished at deploying wide-ranging cultural allusions that it's easy to see why she's won the CBC Literary Award and various other national prizes.
A quieter book than Maggs or Scheier's, it boasts an innovative mix of physical experience and abstraction, and a very accomplished voice.
Saskatoon poet Sheri Benning's second book, Thin Moon Psalm (Brick, 88 pages, $18) has a romantic sensibility while being thoroughly contemporary.
Formally she uses prose poems, short lined free verse lyrics, and even lyrics that begin with prose poetry in footnotes.
But the book is about love, pain, beauty and death, as much as Keats or Shelley was. What's contemporary here is the insistence on the physical.
That Song That Goes ends with these beautiful lines:
"Memory is that song the heart hums
along with. The one without
thinking, beneath breath."
Maurice Mierau is a Winnipeg writer and editor. His column appears on the fourth Sunday of each month.
 |
