A poet’s life — Tom McGauley

by Ron Verzuh

A BC poet has died. Tom McGauley quietly passed away on his 77^th birthday this past summer, leaving the West Coast with another gap in its once-vibrant poetry community. Others have preceded him, most recently Stan Persky and Brian Brett. Brian Fawcett has also left us. They were a louder presence, but Tom was on the hidden edge of that West Coast poetry scene.

He was always a working poet and as significantly he was a working-class poet. In fact, for over 30 years he was a janitor at the Burnaby school board, writing his verse when he was off shift. Much of it has remained unpublished until now.

Thanks to Lee Thompson at Galleon Books, the first of four books will appear posthumously under the title Recarving the Chrysoprase Bowl. Poetry scholar Robert (Luke) Franklin contributes an insightful Afterword to the series. The books are a suitable recognition and a tribute to a poet who loved playing with language in a creative and thoughtful way.  

The key figure of Recarving is “neither a person, nor a thing, but an action, the flow of the Columbia River to its confluence with the Kootenay,” Franklin writes, “to the whorls and spinning dishes that the fluid mechanics of opposing currents carve, and incessantly re-carve, into the maelstrom of this confluence.”

Tom grew up in the West Kootenay city of Castlegar. His family home was a few blocks from that confluence of the Columbia and Kootenay Rivers. As a boy, he would wander close to the mighty waters, stopping at tiny Zuckerberg Island to reflect on surrounding nature. Much of the poetry in Recarving, although he largely estranged himself from Castlegar, was influenced by his experiences there. 

“On one hand he was steeped in the devotional culture of an intensely Roman Catholic household and the religious community associated with it,” Franklin explains. “But the trappings of a life in the bosom of the church were woven into a working-class life pattern on the cusp of a new epoch . . . There is every indication that the centre of gravity of his household was not religion, but work.”

Tom’s father like many fathers in the Kootenays, worked at the metal smelter in nearby Trail, leaving him with early memories of the industrial landscape and how it shaped the community around him. I don’t recall that he worked at the Cominco smelter, but he held jobs at the other major industry in the area, the Celgar sawmill and pulp mill complex where he worked on a fire and security detail. He was also a postal worker while he lived in Castlegar, as depicted in a 1970s documentary film that featured Tom. 

As Franklin notes, “Celgar and Cominco are but two firms associated with the accelerated program of resource development implemented in B.C. in the 1960s. The effluvia produced on the banks of the Columbia may have fed into the soundscape of McGauley’s poetry: ‘Socket turners smelt copper, seething lava trilling all the while cooling’.” 

To Tom, local industry is married to the river: “In the beginning dislike of green binaries was then followed by the smelting of lead, zinc, gold, and silver.” Franklin interprets the linkage: “onto the catalogue of metals hints at the overlay of opposed forces, clerical and commercial, spiritual and industrial, that works unpredictable effects at the depths of his mature poetry.” 

In his boyhood, Tom had a paper route and served as an altar boy at the local Catholic Church. In his early teens, he was an enthusiastic Boy Scout under the guidance of the late Lloyd Groutage. In his final year of high school in 1966 he was vice-president of the student council. On graduating, he received the Stanley Humphries High School Citizenship Award, one of only three such honours. He was an erudite youth who continued to be fascinated by poetry and politics throughout his life.

“Canada is patiently awaiting the election of Tom… for Prime Minister,” claimed the yearbook, “He is very active in school affairs and can be seen wandering down the hallways with a stack of papers under his arm while everyone else is slaving away in class.” It was a testament to Tom’s studious nature when the entry added, “How do you do it, Tom?” 

His later friends will remember him as a critical thinker, an acute observer of the life, a sometime contrarian, an adviser, but most of all as a poet with working-class roots that he never forgot. His school year book offered one of Tom’s early poems. It was possibly Tom’s first published poem. It confirms his concern for the fate of the world. It was entitled “Thoughts”:

Naked arms in humble plea
Rise from an ancient gnarled tree
A tree that once in grandeur stood
Shrouded in an emerald hood.
Alone, yet grasping life,
Witnessing man in foolish strife.
Battles, dying groaning men
Have come within its saddened ken.
Now as it watches men pass by,
Beneath an ever darkening sky,
It wonders ever has man learned to love
His fellow men and peaceful dove.

In later years, themes of his work stretched more broadly into regional, national and world issues and trends. “That the Columbia is an international river may then implicate the fusion of times and places in McGauley’s representations of it,” Franklin states. “The regimes of de-inhabitation and displacement that precede the rearing of so-called megadams link otherwise distant worlds.”

In the poem “Come Here,” Tom says he “was born in Columbary Flood year.” The flood of 1948 devastated Kootenay communities. After McGauley so dates his birth, Franklin says “he veers from his own natal shores to “the native place / of Namalvar,” Tamil Nadu:

born in Columbary flood year
now how many times to the native place of
Namalvar seeking to return and those arms
and heart otherwise just joe
blow in the moon house of the construction

In the early 1970s, Tom moved to Burnaby where he lived for much of his life while travelling regularly to Mexico, Taiwan, Ireland, Spain, to the Philippines with a niece, and to his beloved India. He was on the periphery of a poetic movement that heralded the arrival of poets like George Bowering, Canada’s first poet laureate, Tom Wayman, and Fred Wah (also from the West Kootenay), among many others. 

Inspiring TISH magazine and several other publications, the movement also introduced Tom to the Black Mountain Poets. He was a long-time admirer of American poet Charles Olson, a leader of the Black Mountain school, as well as other American poets like Robin Blazer, Robert Creeley, and Jack Spicer.

While studying at Simon Fraser University, he met Ralph Maud, an English professor who specialized in Olson’s work. Tom quickly became immersed in Olson’s classic Maximus Poems and would become a friend and protégé to Maud in pursuing scholarly poetry studies of his own.

Tom had connections to several other communities as well. He was a member of the New Democratic Party and for a time he joined a Marxist-Leninist group. An activist, he was a studious and critical observer of politics at home and worldwide. At the municipal level, he served on the Burnaby Parks Board. 

Never shy in expressing his opinions, Tom took his politics seriously whether it was the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Canada’s treatment of immigrants or the NDP’s health care policy. He loved the repartee that goes with a good argument and he wasn’t afraid to take a stand in support of oppressed populations.

He often visited India, an adopted country, where he met the two young men who would share his life back in B.C. Tom worked hard to ensure that the men found safe passage and a warm welcome to Canada. Both have become well established and continued to love and respect Tom. 

The Doukhobors, a Russian religious sect in the Kootenays, also became one of Tom’s adopted communities. He greatly admired his friend, the late Doukhobor scholar Jack McIntosh, for translating and analyzing historic documents about the sect. He devoted himself to gathering artifacts and long-sequestered documents and working to have them housed at the Simon Fraser University Archives.

In this segment from Recarving, he retraces his memory of the Doukhobors, invoking their history, racial troubles and a leader’s death. The events depicted had a profound and lasting effect on him:

Confluent inter-penetrating valleys
to higher mountain villages
houses burning by the
hundred, glacial terraces
stagger up Zion ridge,
explosion
and his death lift train car roof
village and river
pine and sawmills, highways and
pilgrimages, spring floods
and funerals
birthdays and twilight woman
carved from a stump
her sculptor rowing out
to save children from drowning.
Intoxicated orchard, lip of childhood
where patriarch hills
reach beyond villages on
the Plain of Consolation.

Before retiring, Tom suffered a concussion when he fell at work. The accident led to a long struggle to cope with the injury. In spite of the pain, he continued to work on his poetry books and keep a watchful eye on his North Burnaby community.

On the social side, Tom loved dim sum and would regularly gather with friends at a local Chinese restaurant. He delighted in ordering his favourite dishes for the table. It was a meal that turned into a social gathering and an exchange of views on the latest political and poetic developments. The late Simon Fraser University English professor Gerry Zaslove often brought his wisdom and insight to the table as did several others.

As Marian, one of his three sisters, remembers, Tom served as a passionate director of family plays in his youth: “I saw him leading us, cape flowing, sceptre in hand, head crowned, up to the stage of the front lawn. Likely an old sheet, a stick and perhaps an imagined crown. That crown, however, brought the memory that we sometimes called him King Tom.” For her, he was a “validator and my encourager.” Tom knew that it was important to “nurture and care for family members,” she recalled, but his extended “family was his writing.”

Poetry infused Tom’s life and shaped it as he ‘recarved’ words in a never-ending attempt to squeeze more meaning from them. His passing was swift and silent, leaving us with his poetry to ponder and consider as we navigate the troubled world he left behind. In the words of his mentor Ralph Maud, we bid farewell to this “stern and marvellous poet.”

Ron Verzuh is a writer, historian, and lifelong friend of Tom McGauley. Condolences are offered to his surviving family members and his extended Indian family. [[Editor’s note: Ron has recently reviewed books by Mark Waddell, R. Bruce Macdonald, George M. Abbott, Barry Potyondi, Brandon Marriott, Harpreet Sekha, The Simon Fraser University Retirees Association, and Bill Arnott for BCR.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

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