Giants of poetry and sport

Reviewed by Bill Robertson (Saskatoon StarPhoenix , May 17, 2008)

Giants of poetry and sport 

Hyland collection remarkable for its breadth, depth and exuberance

Bill Robertson
Special to The StarPhoenix

LOVE OF MIRRORS
By Gary Hyland, Coteau Books, $19.95

NIGHT WORK: THE SAWCHUK POEMS
By Randall Maggs, Brick Books, $20

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Here are two very large books of poetry, one from a giant of letters here in Saskatchewan and one about a giant of sport.

Moose Jaw's Gary Hyland, with help from editor, Amy Caughlin, has put together a selection of poems from six of his collections, along with a substantial number of new ones, while Newfoundland poet Randall Maggs has gotten into the life, mind, and times of champion NHL goalie Terry Sawchuk to give readers some idea of what might have been going on inside the talented and troubled warhorse of the six-team era.

What is immediately impressive about Hyland's Love of Mirrors is the breadth of his reading, learning, experience, and understanding, as well as his sheer exuberance and compassion for his subjects. Hyland's fellow poet and friend Lorna Crozier, in her introduction, notes the facility with which he moves from loving poems about Moose Jaw boys Deke, Scrawny, Zip, Magoo and others -- young guys we once marvelled could even be the subjects of poems -- to ones about tai chi, the famous photograph of the burning Vietnamese girl running from the napalm strike, burial tombs on the west coast of Ireland, and an imaginary employee of a big corporation who feels like a nobody.

And on top of his relentless desire to push the boundaries of what he will write about is Hyland's zest for experimenting with form. Besides the free verse, prairie anecdotal style, which he does very well, Hyland turns his hand to such forms as the sonnet, villanelle, pantoum, and various types of multi-part and prose poems. He pays tribute to numerous poets who have passed on, including Anne Szumigalski, Al Purdy, Gwen MacEwen, and John V. Hicks, and he takes two different looks at the genesis of that famous anonymous lyric of the 15th Century, Western Wind. He also addresses a poem to students for them to engage with in an essay. Hyland was an English teacher for years, after all.

Besides having an inquisitive mind that will make poems out of anything, Hyland is also an exemplar of the poet who stares long at something the rest of us take for granted, then writes in a philosophical vein about what he's seen. In Occupants he meditates on our human moving back and forth across the country and concludes, "This is how we flee and seek each other. How we mix/ and sift the mysteries. These flights into our distances." In Lateness he opens with the staggering lines, "It's never as late as you think./ It's always later."

Hyland now lives with ALS (or Lou Gehrig's disease) and his condition lends these poems a profound poignancy. In one of his new poems, the beautiful Note to the Woman Who Danced in the Park Today, he opens by saying "You never saw me," then describes a woman throwing herself into a dance, despite the informal public forum. He closes by speaking of what she did as a miracle for which he gives thanks, then, in brackets, closes: "I was the lean, bald one who seemed/ to be reading a book by the gate." There he sat, pretending not to stare, and taking it all in with gratitude. We can be grateful, as well, for this collection of poems.

AND NOW to hockey. Well-known writer and journalist Roy MacGregor was writing recently in a national paper about a phenomenally talented young goalie and, of course, stories of talented goalies of the past came up. It didn't take MacGregor long to mention the amazing feats of Terry Sawchuk who helped both the Red Wings and the Leafs to Stanley Cups and who posted stats in the '50s and '60s that still stagger the mind.

Newfoundland poet Randall Maggs, in his second collection, gives us a huge book, complete with photographs and a bibliography, on the tormented goalie.
Maggs, who has contributed numerous poems to various anthologies of hockey writing and whose brother, Darryl, actually played in the NHL, has pored over countless newspaper and magazine stories and has talked with dozens of players, coaches, writers, and refs who knew Sawchuk and watched him in action.

Beginning with a piece of the autopsy report on Sawchuk, dead at age 40, and ending with a stark black and white shot of him from Look magazine displaying his many, many facial scars, Maggs strings together lyric and prose poems, as well as recreations of conversations with hockey veterans, to show us an iconoclastic sports hero wearing very little, if any, of his mantle of greatness.

Maggs starts with Sawchuk as a boy in Winnipeg, marginalized by his Ukrainian background and finding solace in hockey. From there Maggs moves on to poems on Sawchuk's famous crouch, the symbolic women who have nursed him, the "floating faces after surgery -- angels/ or nurses, I don't care," and the jitters even a gifted goalie had to fight: "even in those heady shoulder-hoisting days,/ something darker seemed to bide its time./ Despite the accolades, the nights were bad."

What emerges, through poems about the ill-fated Bruins exhibition trip to Newfoundland -- Sawchuk was traded to the Bruins for a time -- and stories of goalies, of both famous and down-on-their-luck hockey players, and, finally, of what it was like as Sawchuk's long career wound down, is a picture of a very lonely man.
Sawchuk had a wife and seven children, but they barely get a mention here, and not because Maggs is concentrating on net-minding heroics. What we see here is a man who seemed only fully alive when he was between the posts in goal and who spent the rest of his time worried sick about his performance and how one mistake could ruin his team and bring on the wrath of owners and fans.

What a hell of a job he had -- and did -- and Maggs captures much of it through the imagined eyes of Sawchuk himself and through the voices of those who knew he was a different kind of guy altogether.

Robertson is a Saskatoon poet and freelance writer.