The Slidingback Hills

Terry Goldie is an associate professor of English at York University and
author of Fear and Temptation.

I first encountered Peter Trower in Tom Wayman’s anthology Going for Coffee: Poetry on the Job (1981).Wayman was trying to show that poetry and work are not necessarily separate activities. I found myself less than convinced by most of the poems Wayman selected, including those by Trower. I wanted to believe that something other than boring pseudo-working-class doggerel could be written about manual labor, but in Wayman’s collection the good poetry about blue collar tasks seemed to be written from a white collar distance. The material by those such as Trower, who gave the impression of responding to direct and extended participation in blue collar work had less imagination.

Trower’s poetry has grown. The Slidingback Hills comes much closer to the real thing than any other poems I have seen about work. These sparkle and are directly involved in their subject, like love poems at their best. My own experience of logging has been limited to following some of those big trucks in the mountains of British Columbia, but after reading Trower, I feel like I know what it’s about.

In his introduction Al Purdy gives his imprimatur (not bad for sales, I would think), and notes how rare Trower’s working credentials are in a country of academic poets. Yet a reader doesn’t need these biographical notes to assess Trower’s poetic stance. A fine example is “The Country of the Bulb,” about the late Gordon Gibson, Sr., the infamous logger and father of B.C.’s one-time provincial Liberal leader. Trowen portrays Gibson with the affection of someone who “knows where he came from.”

Still, that is only the first half of the book. The second section, divided between poems about prison and miscellaneous grouping, is much less successful. After reading these pieces I wondered if I was truly convinced by Trower’s poems about logging or merely surprised that he could write even a half-decent poem on that subject. After rereading, I haven’t changed my mind. The title of this section, “Chainsaws in the Cathedral,” is a good summation of what Trowen has accomplished. No small feat.