by Randall Maggs
Brick Books 2008
Reviewed by Dan Magers

“Lure the son of a bitch with an open lane.”

Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems by Canadian poet Randall Maggs is nearly 200 pages long. Whenever a volume of poetry defies the 40-80 page fiefdom, it is worth taking note. This one is about Terry Sawchuk, NHL’s greatest goalie. Maggs has an easy way with meter, and his interest in Irish poetry suggests he has given considerable thought to conceiving of lines of plain-spoken eloquence. Lines move in and out of meter with little interest in overall form or structure. This can be both a blessing and a curse. Here, the narrative drives the poems rather than the language itself. That is not to say that the lines are slack, but that they lack tension and torque. A typical passage reads:

He falls down twice on his way to the net. I sense
the crowd lean forward, ready to leap. What’s that about?
Is this what it all comes down to after Detroit, a little goalie show
for the fans? Waiting at center ice to take their shots, his team-mates
circle nervously, flipping snow at friends in the stands.
What wouldn’t they give to put one past me,
here in front of the home crowd.

The narrative will be familiar to anyone with passing knowledge of the trajectory of our sports greats: childhood-marring family death (“and smiling, cocked / his head to make a final point (they said), / half rose, and then pitched forward on his face.”); constant touring (“Traveling east, the stubble fields gave way / to endless trees. Bored, I’d shouldered past the blast / between the cars”); glories of victory (“The gods lean out / below the smoky beams and cheer the circling / goalie hoisted high.”); greedy owners (“While Jack across the river/ signed a check and closed his door.”); constant physical pain (“Darkest night of his life, once the morphine / seeped away. He wept and prayed.”); all topped off with a generous helping of nostalgia (“’That one’s him in Detroit in ’52. What he did in the playoffs that year will never be done again.”).

The book does a lot of things right, using the poems the way a traditional biography might use chapters, giving us an anecdote, a reflection, a new prism in which we can uncover Sawchuk the man. It is well-researched, with a bibliography a journalist or academic would envy. The book seems to be written with a wider audience in mind than the average poetry book. There are even pictures, including a rather ghastly one of Sawchuk’s face that is somewhat well-known.

A few multi-page prose poems throughout the book are so successful, they inadvertently demonstrate the limits of the competent quasi-iambic narrative in the rest of the book. Simply put, the book is way too long, and the material is not enlivened by the use of verse. I struggled with the pervasive sense that my enjoyment of the book depended on me knowing each wing forward blasting shots at Sawchuk’s un-masked face. And yet, one knows where the book is headed with its combination of braggadocio and sentimentality. Individual lines, and even poems, do not stand out. The integrity of the work is in the book, not the lines, not the poems. In that sense, it is more like prose. While Night Work gleefully exceeds the regular poetry book length, the 200 pages of poetry do not exceed the emotional and thematic dynamic of the regular sports biography, whether found in prose or on ESPN Classic, begging the question, why not just write a prose bio? It is one medium clamoring after the virtues of another.

There are some exceptions. For example, the droll, Frederick Seidel-like mashup of plain-talk and metrical and rhythmical ingenuity:

And doubled up all night, my Christ,
what a life. Like Pompeii’s dead, my arse in the air,
bare. I don’t care.

A more sustained success can be found in the poem “Colour in this Country” which describes Sawchuk’s team watching its opponents (possibly amateur, as was typical of the era) coming out of the bar,

Talking together and joking, they passed
in front of our bus like young men at the front, their days
reduced to frivolity and disaster.

The poignant banality of this bunch, along with Sawchuk’s wearied and dispirited voice, joins into a meditation on the landscape they are living and playing in:

You sensed a sparing use
of colour in this country. You’d get a splotch of it here and there,
a memorable blouse in a lounge, a clock promoting rum,
the local team in its colours taking the ice.

The poem ends with a further removal, the just-described scene revealed as a memory:

My own mood was darkening.
Everything seemed to be splitting away.
In the photograph, all you could really see were shapes
curving darkly into a white that might have been
the page’s nothingness.

A shorter book of more of these moments would have greatly enhanced the work overall. That said, Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems gets an extra star if you read the Wikipedia entry on Sawchuk. Two stars if you love narrative poetry. Hockey fans, take heed; Terry Sawchuk fans, go nuts.

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