F YOU look up “sur- vivor’’ in the dictionary,

@ you won't find a picture of poet/novelist Peter Trower, but the definition will fit like one of his charac- teristic caps.

John Moore NOW SPOTLIGHT

For a guy who ought to be dead for any of a half-dozen good reasons, he’s conspicuously alive, having just published his first novel, Grogan’s Cafe — irom Har- bour Publishing, and reviewed in the Nov. 10 News — on the heels of eight collections of poetry.

Asa child, brought to Canada from England by his widowed mother to escape the Secand World War “Blitz,” ‘ he travelled ona blacked-out convoy ship stalked by U-boat wolf packs.

The Kriegsmarine missed Trower; they sent the ship to the bottom on its return voyage.

‘sensitive bookish English schoolboy, he was dumped into the rough and iumbie life of the

“stump ranch” company town at the Port Melton pulp mil!

He learned to scrap and when he was later sent to an English- style boarding school in North Vancouver, he survived the phobic, obsessive views of human sexuality the headmaster inflicted on his charges.

As a teenager on Vancouver's tough, post-war downtown Eastside, then dominaiad by vicious gangs of “‘zoot-suiters,”” he found out the hard way that he had a double, a near-twin — a

unkie hoodlum who was as well

nown as he was thoroughly disliked by both other gangsters and the hard-boiled cops af the time.

Far more than 20 years, before the industry fell into the hands of a few big conglomerates, he was a logger, working the ‘‘gypo’’ out- fits that ran full-bore and short- handed with worn-out equipment and body counts that would mal. a wartime platoon sergeant cringe. There were near misses, but he came through with his life and all his limbs.

The other side of the logging life was the boozy oblivion of Skid Row, the obligatory back-from- camp blowout that turned into a man-eating conveyor belt, sucking broke, hungover loggers back into the camps, then spitting them onto the sidewalks of the meanest streets in town with a stake to start down the bottle-strewn trail to the next camp.

During the late 1950s, he began to write, in the stale-sweat fug of bunkhouses, in fleabag rooms, in poisonous nooks of the Kitimat smelter where he took a two-year

“vacation in hell’’ from toxging, and mostly in pubs where admit- ting you were a poet could get you killed — a circumstance that left him with a permanent self-defen- sive mumble that vanishes only when he reads or talks about his work,

He showed talent as a car- toonist, but a brief stint at the Vancouver School of Art, when it was home to the vanguard of the neo-Beat hipsters of the ’60s, reinforced his determination to express himself in verbal rather than.visual images.

NEWS photo Nell Lucente

POET/NOVELIST Peter Trower doesn’t regret the time spent playing with the building blocks of rhyme and meter.

“| wrote a lot of bad poetry,’’ he admits ruefully, ‘“Really bad poetry.”

Largely self-educated as a writer, he read omnivorously and absorb- ed influences, good and bad, as readily a3 he absorbed g glasses of draft and crocks of cheap wine.

The memory of his mother reading Victorian and Georgian poets aloud to him as a child led him to begin by emulating the bunkhouse ballads of Robert Ser- vice and Robert Swanson, even as he was soaking up the whole modern tradition fram Walt Whitman and Dylan Thomas to Robert frost, Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology, William Carlos Williams, Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti, as well as Canadian contemporaries like Milton Acorn and John Newlove.

Trower learned his extracur- tricular lessons well. And though his work quickly evolved, he doesn’t regret the time spent playing with the building blocks of rhyme and meter.

“You've got to walk before you run and learn to draw before you

paint,”” he says. “When you know how to write a sonnet, like Milton Acorn, you can write what you feel and have a reasonable chance of saying what you mean.”

The result of a long, lonely, sometimes dangerous appren- ticeship, his “free verse” is the embodiment of Ezra Pound's dic- tum: ‘No vers is libre for the inan wha wants to do 4 good job.”

Unlike some of the people passing themselves off as poets these days, he not only knows what a “villanelle’’ is, he can write one that will pass muster as more than an academic in-joke.

Though he dislikes being pigeon-holed as a “logger-poet’’ or even a ‘‘work-poet’’ (and he’s written many fine poems that don’t fit the bill), the body of work, including two major retrospective collections, Ragged Horizons and The Slidingback Hills, is a brutally honest, often ambivalent record of a life which has always humanized the former “lumberjack heroes’ it's now fashionable to despise.

His work likewise celebrates and deplores the industry that shaped his life.

An established niche as a poet would satisfy most writers in this country. Why leap into the un- charted waters of fiction?

“l've always written fiction,” Trower insists, ‘‘t was very influ- enced by Kerouac in the ‘50s and | wrote a lot of stuff that was very autobiographical.”

{He continued a column, Lines from a Life-Log to the Sunshine Coast News in his hometown cf

See Trower page 40

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