A poet who became a West Coast icon, Peter Trower died Nov. 10 in North Vancouver at age 87. Gibsons-based publisher Silas White called him “one of the country’s most accomplished poets, who wrote brilliant, refined, deeply moving poetry in the vein of Dylan Thomas.”
Trower was born in England and his family immigrated to Vancouver when he was 10. After his mother married again, he came to live in Port Mellon, then a rural community with a one-room schoolhouse. After high school he headed for the woods, working at many low-paying and rugged jobs in logging camps.
“It was not easy being a Port Mellon-raised logger in the 1950s and ’60s whose true passion was poetry,” Silas said. “Pete proved that first-rate writing could be found in these woods – stories deserving to be shared all over the world.”
When Trower started publishing poetry and prose in the late 1960s, he turned his experiences in the bush into subject matter for his work. He earned acclaim as an authentic voice from the woods, a true B.C. original – the logger poet.
Publisher Howard White remembers that Trower was most proud of his first book, Moving Through Mystery, published by Talonbooks in 1969.
“I had heard rumours of a poet in Gibsons when I put out the first volume of Raincoast Chronicles in 1972,” Howard said. Trower was miffed when he saw that they were writing about what he considered to be his turf on the Coast. “Peter became a major contributor to the second Raincoast and onwards.”
Harbour Publishing brought out some of Trower’s collections of poetry, including the last one, Haunted Hills and Hanging Valleys, a collection of Trower’s work from 1969 through 2004. Howard considers that it wasn’t until Between the Sky and the Splinters (1974) that Trower’s writing found his own poet’s voice. One of Trower’s favourites was “The Last Spar-Tree on Elphinstone Mountain.”
“To me he seemed like a typical logger,” Howard recalls, “and I came from a logging camp myself.” But Trower had not been born into that world and it was hard to see any traces of his former life prior to working in the bush.
Everyone in Trower’s circles was a heavy drinker, but it did not slow his creativity. “He could write through everything,” Howard said.
“He had a fierce determination to be a writer and he would make anyone, anywhere, stop and listen to a poem. In the logging camps his nickname was Pete the Poet, but in literary circles he was known as Pete the Logger.”
Howard also notes that Trower was never shy about walking up to another writer and saying, “I’m a writer too.” That’s how he met other poets and authors such as Allen Ginsberg and Al Purdy and became friends with them.
One of the lights of his life was his partner Yvonne Klan, and he wrote one of his more romantic poems for her, “A Wild Girl to Walk the Weathers With.”
One of Trower’s friends, Brad Benson, notes they were childhood sweethearts, but were parted for many years before finding each other again. “He was a lucky man with Yvonne,” Benson said. “They collaborated on works together.”
Author Jim Christy recalls that he met Trower in 1992 and they would get together often, whenever Trower was at his Gibsons home, to have a drink and talk about music – R&B, jazz – and everything else.
“We didn’t talk about writing,” Christy said. “Neither of us had much to do with the literary world.”
Although Trower was noted as the logger poet, Christy pointed out that he wasn’t one-dimensional. “He was more than a logging poet – he was a lot wider than that or he couldn’t have written these great poems.”
Christy remembers such poems as “Annie of the Corridors” in which a lonely guy in from the bush at the Marble Arch Hotel is fascinated by the cleaning lady and sees the tragedy of their separate existences.
There will be a memorial and reading of Trower’s poetry in Vancouver at the Railway Stage and Beer Café at 579 Dunsmuir (formerly the Railway Club) on Saturday, Nov. 25 at 3 p.m. A Facebook site has been started by his nephew Bob Trower: www.facebook.com/AuthorPeterTrower and he invites comments.
