BOOK REVIEW
Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems
by Randall Maggs
(London, Ontario, Brick Books, 2008).

Poets are a rare sighting on the radar of a hockey fan. Think about it, would your team’s tough guy be seen reading a book of poems?

It’s a dilemma that Randall Maggs confronted in the production of Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems. His brother, Darryl, played with the Chicago Blackhawks and California Golden Seals in the early 1970s. When Randall needed people to chat with about the old days in researching for this book, he first turned to his sibling for stories.

As I recall him telling the tale last spring in Victoria, BC, it was several conversations into the process when he said something like, “The poems are coming together.”

The response from Darryl on the other end of the line: first, silence. Then, “You’re writing a book of [fricking] poems?!”

Actually, he was, and truthfully, you need to read it, not as some kind of self improvement project, but because you’ll enjoy both the poems and the book itself.
Part of what makes Magg’s Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems, so compelling is that the poems tell the truth in spare language, leaving the reader gasping for breath at the strength of their revelations.

Witness this example:

In the old films, the ice looks more like winter,
the boards were boards and clear. I see the lone official
out for a skate, flipping the puck in the air. He seems
in no rush for the teams to appear, his long stride
preoccupied and familiar.

(from “Neither Rhyme nor Reason”)

So begins the book, and if you’re saying to yourself, “Yep, I get that,” then you’re right. You’ll get these poems. Later on, here’s another scene-turned-poem:

“Oh he could be a son of a bitch,” says Ted,
who ought to know. Ted Lindsay, the captain, leader
of the infamous Battle of the Soo, the first man into any fray,
forget it’s an exhibition game. For six full minutes slugs it out
with Red-Eye Hay. They catch their breath and start again
in the penalty box, finally going at it in the stands with the cops.

(From “Ascension”)

Especially when focusing on Sawchuk himself (who played from the 1950s until 1970s with a collection of teams including the Red Wings), these poems revel in the rough - the terror and insecurity of the life of the goalie, particularly 40 and more years ago. Back in Sawchuk’s day, the face of the man told the story of the life, as Maggs points out in three memorable ways.

First there’s the autopsy report reproduced on the page just before the table of contents. It starts, “There are multiple fine scars present over the forehead and the face,” and it goes on to detail the grotesque masque Sawchuk’s visage became during his career.

Then, there’s the photo reproduced from an old Look magazine which shows Sawchuk’s scars, highlighting each one to the point of horror. That appears near the end of the book.

In between are the poems themselves. Thematically, Maggs covers the highs and lows of a season and a career, the self-doubts that plague goalies and particularly in the case of Sawchuk, the demons which drove him on and were with him at the end. And it is in probing the mind of this goalie where Maggs takes his greatest risks in the book. Two examples are memorable, both of which involve the physical injuries Sawchuk endured.

In “Let’s Go Dancing,” Maggs describes Sawchuk’s thoughts while the doctor stitches him after he “take[s] one full in the mouth” this way:

Hums to himself as he thumbs back my lip
and murmers it’s getting to be a nasty neighborhood.
Hums the same tune as last time, stitching my lip,
I count five on the inside, seven out, is twelve,
thinking, what’s that song? “Forget the freezing,” I tell him,
thinking of Lumley the night when they toss me over his sweater.

from “Let’s Go Dancing”

The reader gets a flash of realization as the stanza ends that back then, the goalie’s job was never secure, even minute by minute, and it is through moments like that that the demons who haunted Sawchuk, and perhaps any goalie of his era, come to live on the page.

The book ends, too, in a medical setting, this time, “New York Hospital: I.C.U.” where Sawchuk was taken after the incident which ended up killing him. That, as old-time fans know, is still the fodder for mystery and speculation. Rather than quote from that poem, though, I’ll leave it to you to read for yourself.

I think you’ll find that you’ll learn more than you wanted to know about goaltending and Terry Sawchuk, but that you wouldn’t part with your new-found knowledge for anything.

Hockey fans, this is a beautifully produced book, satisfying to hold, thrilling to read, mystifying in its ideas. And chances are if you buy it and carry it to the rink to read between your kid’s shifts in Pee Wee, no one will see the subtitle in little letters on the cover which ends with the word “poems.” But if they do, and it doesn’t agree with them, chuck ‘em. After you read Night Work, you’re never going to look at the history of hockey, nor at the guy between the pipes for your favorite team, the same way again.