Launch for Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems by Randall Maggs

The launch for Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems (Brick Books) by Randall Maggs is on February 19 at 7:00 p.m. at the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto. The author will be present with hockey writer and Globe and Mail sports columnist Stephen Brunt.

Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems recounts the life, in and out of hockey, of Terry Sawchuk, premier goalie in the era of the original-six NHL. Like many other goalies, Sawchuk was "a guy from a different planet," but he was more different than other goalies. Maggs probes his upbringing in a household of Ukrainian immigrant parents, a "faraway father" and a mother who was the "only one in the world who scared him," forming a dark and unpredictable character that would be perpetually at odds with his highly public athletic life. No wonder he lost his way. The book draws a reader inside the complex personality of Sawchuk, and follows him through the triumphs and failures of his twenty-year NHL career. 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.

Randall Maggs teaches English Literature at Corner Brook’s Sir Wilfred Grenfell College of Memorial University of Newfoundland. He is a co-anthologist of Canadian, Newfoundland and Irish poetry, and is widely anthologized himself, most recently in The Way It Looks From Here: Contemporary Canadian Writing on Sports (ed. Stephen Brunt). He is the author of a previous book of poems Timely Departures (1994).