New ebooks From Canadian Indies
Description
A new edition of a hockey saga, wrapping the game's story in the "intense, moody, contradictory" character of Terry Sawchuk, one of its greatest goalies.
In compact, conversational poems, Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems follows the tragic trajectory of the life and work of Terry Sawchuk, dark driven genius of a goalie who survived twenty tough seasons in an era of inadequate upper-body equipment and no player representation. But no summary touches the searching intensity of Maggs's poems. They range from meditations on ancient/modern heroism to dramatic capsules of actual games, in which the mystery of character meets the mystery of transcendent physical performance. Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems is illustrated with photographs mirroring the text, depicting key moments in the career of Terry Sawchuk, his exploits and his agony.
This 10th anniversary edition of the book marks both the 50th anniversary of the last time the Leafs won the Stanley Cup and the 100th anniversary of the Leafs as a team. With rich reflections on the book by novelist Angie Abdou and Hockey Night in Canada host Ron MacLean, as well as excerpts from scores of reviews by the likes of Gord Downie and Dave Bidini, this new edition of Night Work is a must-have for lovers of hockey and poetry alike.
Denied the leap and dash up the ice,
what goalies know is side to side, an inwardness of monk
and cell. They scrape. They sweep. Their eyes are elsewhere
as they contemplate their narrow place. Like saints, they pray for nothing,
which brings grace. Off-days, what they want is space. They sit apart
in bars. They know the length of streets in twenty cities.
But it's their saving sense of irony that further
isolates them as it saves.
— from "One of You"
About the Authors
Randall Maggs
Angie Abdou has a PhD from the University of Calgary and is a Professor of Creative Writing at Athabasca University. Her first novel, The Bone Cage (NeWest Press), was a finalist in CBC's Canada Reads competition. She is also the author of Between and In Case I Go (both from Arsenal Pulp Press), The Canterbury Trail (Brindle & Glass), Anything Boys Can Do (Thistledown Press), and the memoir Home Ice (ECW Press). She lives in Fernie, BC.
Angie Abdou has a PhD from the University of Calgary and is a Professor of Creative Writing at Athabasca University. Her first novel, The Bone Cage (NeWest Press), was a finalist in CBC's Canada Reads competition. She is also the author of Between and In Case I Go (both from Arsenal Pulp Press), The Canterbury Trail (Brindle & Glass), Anything Boys Can Do (Thistledown Press), and the memoir Home Ice (ECW Press). She lives in Fernie, BC.
Contributor Notes
Randall Maggs is the author of the poetry collection Timely Departures (Breakwater Books, 1994), and co-editor of two anthologies pairing Newfoundland and Canadian poems with those of Ireland. He is one of the organizers and the former artistic director of Newfoundland's March Hare, the largest literary festival in Atlantic Canada. He is a former professor of literature at Sir Wilfred Grenfell College, Memorial University. Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems, his second poetry collection (Brick Books, 2008), was the winner of the 2008 Winterset Award, the 2009 E.J. Pratt Poetry Prize, and the 2010 Kobzar Literary Award, and was shortlisted for the 2009 Heritage and History Book Award, longlisted for the Relit Award and named a Globe 100 book in 2008. He lives in Steady Brook, near Corner Brook, Newfoundland.
