4 - Sunday, December 28, 1986 - North Shore News Bob Hunter ® strictly personal ® JUST ACROSS Howe Sound lives a poet named Peter Trower who is already a legend and getting more that way all the time. I first met Trower, good grief, it must have been the mid-sixties. He was introduced as Pete the Poet. We drank beer together a lot down at the Cecil Hotel. The | Cecil was the nearest drinking place to UBC then, so it attracted bohemians and literary types galore. For some reason, most of the male poets 1 know are macho drinkers, rather than being effete like they’re supposed to be. Earle Birney, Irving Layton, Al Purdy, etc. In this great tradition, Trower was a hard-drinking poet’s poet, a lowlife binge veteran who had worked as a logger and actually did some time, a kind of William Burroughs outlaw figure. To look at him, you'd figure | him for a hood of some kind. He always wore a fedora, with a smoke dangling out of the corner of his mouth. His upper lip was cast in a marvellous Presleyesque sneer, His cheeks were bluish, his skin otherwise a pubcrawler shade of pale. 1 think he still wore drapes, complete with suspenders and § massively-padded zoot suit shoulders. If he didn’t, it at least seemed like he was wearing that kind of a ’40s outfit anyway. His poetry was what you could call beatnik back then. I knew he was an immortal character. That much was clear right away. Whether he was also a great poet, f I wasn’t absolutely sure at first. I mean, how could you tell? Poems are like wine. A certain amount of time has to go by. He wrote: good stuff, but was it eter- A nal? The Cecil has been completely tuined, of course, by the in- f troduction of non-stop strippers and thundering rock n’ roll, and f isn’t suited for anything quite so old-fashioned as having an argument about Canadian Lit. In the old days, poets clustered together in the corners, pushing each other’s chairs over, throw- ing beer in each other’s faces. In- f tellectual discussions, y’know. Beyond a certain point in the | drinking, Pete would get so lun- ched it became nearly impossible to understand a word he was slurring. And of course, like — Dylan Thomas, the more he drank the more brilliant he got. | Too damn bad you just couldn't hear all those fantastically-ex- pressed thoughts coming through. Pete’s claim to fame then was a few thin volumes of poetry with tides like Between the Sky and the Splinters, Ragged Horizons, Moving Through The Mystery. He now has more than a dozen books out. His latest is The Slidingback Hills, published by Oberon Press. God, it’s lovely! His best thing yet. Like the Cecil, Pete has chang- ed. Unlike the Cecil, he has changed for the better. His work is strenger, more beautiful than ever. Clean, I guess, would be the word, although he has always delivered clear, pure images. There is a terrific painting of Trower on the cover, based on a poem called Doppelganger, about a lookalike who haunted him for years, although they never actu- ally met. The lookalike was a small-time hustler who had rolled many a victim. Time and time, Trower found himself being grabbed by cops or given warnings on the assumption that he was this other “shifty clown.” Finally, having been busted himself, Trower was in the South Wing of Oakalla Prison when he learned the name of the man whose misdeeds had cast such a shadow over his own life. Indeed, in that mirror image, which we see in the painting, another Peter Trower emerges as | if from another dimension. It is his own myth, the hamstrung, doomed basic B.C woodworker with a bottle and . smoke in a lonely downtown beer parlor. Ah, but who is that. sitting beside him, that wiser and tenderer and less-bent guy with the sheaf of poems in his hand? The real Trower is so sensitive inside, because he sees so much and feels so miuch, that to this day he still defends his hyperac- tive perception with generous soothing baths of booze. It re- mains one of the ways to damp the blazing imagination. I think of Peter Trower as the quintessential West Coast poet, the authentic voice, if we can be said to have any central cultural image of ourselves at all. He has distilled an essence here which is British Columbia to its charred roots. It is as though the amputated, decapitated, clear-cut trees had transmuted into hard- eyed men sitting like stumps in smoky big city lounges. Trower isn't just a good poet any longer. He has become a great poet.Truly, genuinely great. (‘Councils \ jcancelled/ Soft Contact Lenses 79... CAPILANO OPTICAL open CAPILAND “til Sunday LEN MACHT ACCIDENT REPORT “A truck backed through my windshield into my wife's face.” 1315 COTTON DRA. NORTH VAN. FORMERLY NAMED PRODUCE CITY NOW FIRST CLASS PRODUCE HAVING THE SAME MANAGEMENT AS ALWAYS. “THE FINEST QUALITY AT COrtrs1on as 980-4581 DUE TO the Christmas holidays, council meetings in al three North Shore municipalides will not) be held on Monday, Dee. 29. Leonard H. Berry (Chartered Lite Underwuiten SAVE 30% — 50% TOWELS & BATH RUGS BY Seerest | Bathrooms Beat comes Be Meetings will resume on Mon- day, Jan. 5. at the following times: North Vancouver City, 7:30 p.m.; North Vancouver District, 7 p.m.; West Vancouver, 8 p.m. SENIOR ANNUITY & R.B.LF. BROKER Available fc, Seniors wishing to convert their R.R.S.P. Funds ‘At Home Appointments Arranged’ 926-5051 985-0054 GaNADA'S FINEST BATH BOUTIQUES SINCE GZS 'S FINEST BATH BOUTIQUES SINCE 1962, PARK ROYAL NORTH 926-5835 OAKRIDGE LANSDOWNE METROTOWN 266-8811 273-7538 439-1697 Japanese THE LOWEST PRICE.” PRICES EFFECTIVE Dec. 29-Jan. 4 U.S. NO RUSSET U.S. FANCY Mandarin jf Oranges / 9 Ib. box! $799 5 wes 1° | 49%. 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