The Hockey Player Sonnets

William Blackburn is a professor of English at the University of
Calgary.

In theory, most of us would accept the argument that a good poet can
make poetry out of virtually anything—the subject is only a pretext,
after all. In practice, when the poet is Canadian and the subject is
hockey, the realist is more than a little prepared to wince. That
neither the lover of poetry nor the lover of hockey need wince at this
collection testifies to the wit and sensitivity and lightness of touch
of award-winning poet Lee. He is a widely published writer and, as this
book makes clear, he certainly deserves to be.

Though Lee clearly loves the game—perhaps some childhood passions are
best not outgrown after all?—his love is anything but blind:
“Perhaps for a fleeting moment when I was ten / I believed that jocks
grew up.” Like Bernard Malamud and W.P. Kinsella (and also Ken Dryden)
he finds in “the game” a way of talking about so many things:
disillusionment (“Pity the Boy Who Believes”), violence, the
bittersweet wisdom of loss (“he had not known it was an elegy / to a
dead time / until he wrote it”). And he does all this—it is
essential to the success of these poems—with a wonderful lightness of
touch as in his moving (and hilarious) poem about a drunken hockey
player in search of love: “I don’t wanna hump, I jes wanna dance.”
Finally, it is not too much to claim for this collection what is
promised by the title of one of its poems: though this work is indeed
about hockey, it is also about the play of “terrifying metaphors.”