Randall Maggs, Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems

Reviewed by Laurie Graham (The Malahat Review, Issue 164, fall 2008)

RANDALL MAGGS, Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems (London: Brick, 2008), Paperbound, 189 pp., $20. 

Is it possible to write poetry on hockey without conjuring a monolithic national mythology, built on the figure of the defiant young hero? Perhaps. Michael Ondaatje writes, in his poem "To a Sad Daughter," on a girl's love of "angry goalies / creatures with webbed feet." The hockey player in his poem is belligerent and otherworldly and a possible, probable antagonist. Or, take Al Purdy's "Hockey Players," which conjures the world that surrounds and subsumes the game he called "a Canadian specific / to salve the anguish of inferiority. Purdy bookends his poem with the quieter notions of injury and childhood failure, which suggest that the places where the myth falters in the individual have an equal hand in that myth's creation. 

Randall Maggs, in his new collection Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems, subverts the sports' place in Canadian myth in a different way: he centres his collection of rough-pitched, understated narrative pieces around goaltender Terry Sawchuk, one of the most successful and tormented men to mind net during the days of the Original Six. No one has yet surpassed Sawchuk's record for career shutouts, but a league darling he was not; known for his erratic and depressive temperament, he died before he could quite the game, as a result of injuries from a brawl with New York Rangers teammate Ron Stewart. Maggs leads us through a patient and, in places, fictionalized chronology of Sawchuk's life and career, from his childhood in Winnipeg, the son of Austrian Ukrainian immigrants, to his last minutes in the I.C.U. of a New York hospital. He draws from stories told to him by players and others who knew Terry, years of reading and research, and his own experience as a young player. "As far as pure veracity is concerned," he says in his afterword, "I don't know which of the three would be the most unreliable." Maggs credits Tolstoy as one of his guides for this work, who, in War and Peace, calls the factual historian"'a deaf man trying to answer questions that no one ahs asked him.'" 

Maggs lays bare the process of mythologizing in Night Work in order to quality how it's used, and, by doing so, betray its impossibilities. In "The Last Faceoff," Maggs' Punch Imlach - coach of the Maple Leafs in 1967 - likens Sawchuk to Horatio for the benefit of the press after their Cup-winning game, and it is significant that he does so with such clumsy intent: 

"Here he is,
you fucking negative Nellies, here's our Horatio,"
the happy foul-mouthed Imlach hugs his battered goalie
and brays at the press, "you know, that guy
who guards the fucking bridge." 

We see, through Imlach, how the act of myth-creation is used to weld butts to stadium seats and pacify reporters, but such rhetoric doesn't spring naturally from the coach's lips; his Horatio metaphor may betray the emotion attached to witnessing his aging players win, but he skips over the physical effect of Sawchuk's intense "doing." No wonder that Sawchuk is a "battered," nameless figure, practically missing while Horatio is invoked.

"Transition Game," a self-effacing praise piece on the work of the goalie that is narrated by Maggs' Sawchuk, compares guarding the net to a "life in the land / of do, devoid of ought and thought, which only shift the load, / the barge titles, swings across the current, the bottom / of the Detroit river, toxic, leaden, waits." Night Work is most concerned with and sensitive to that "land of do," a place of bare action and the desire for bare action replete with a sense of transience, of potential ecstasy, of isolation, even in the midst of a stadium whirring with fans. The goalie - and Sawchuk in particular - stands alone, but, despite the bruises and the stitches, he stands in praise. 

To get at that aloneness, and to highlight how Sawchuk stood apart from the people and players around him, Maggs assumes a number of voices, and one of the most captivating things about this collection is the grace of its polyphony. His poems glide from Sawchuk's voice to Red Wings coach Jack Adam's, to a goalie from Corner Brook, where Sawchuk travels with the Bruins to play some dubious, publicity-driven games - no work by Maggs would be complete without a nod to Newfoundland - and then into the poet's/interviewer's head, as he listens to stories told by referee Red Storey and sceptical ex-defenceman Gary Bergman. Transitions from one poem to the next are smooth and unhurried, and if it takes about a stanza for readers to parse out whose head they're in, the honest demotic lines keep them interested until they know who's speaking. The poems' arrangement into a loose chronology - and, more significantly, a series of suites that show how intractable Sawchuk was, his desperation to guard the net at all costs, and, by consequence, the importance of memory and, in a roundabout way, love that comes with involvement in the sport of hockey - gives an almost novelistic shape to the book. 

In Night Work, we are party to a fully realized world through one man, which should successfully draw hockey devotees and neophytes into the work in equal measure. If his readers' expectation is for a poetry that touts the robust-hockey-nation line, then Maggs has not delivered. What he has done, though, is shown us our hopes in relation to a sport like hockey, what we demand in relation to how the players sacrifice. Night Work's greatest feat is that it incites the battle with national myth by examining one of its giants, in an attempt to translate the imperfect pitch of his most human voice. 

- Laurie Graham