Laurence Hutchman

Playing Hockey on Crang’s Pond

We dreamed of playing at the

Maple Leaf Gardens,

waited for Hockey Night in

Canada following

The Plouffe Family and

Don Messer’s Jubilee,

waited for the Ford to drive

into the gas station

to the chorus of the Esso anthem:

What a great, great feeling,

what a wonderful sense

of pure enjoyment and

of confidence...

Sometime at the end of the fifties

the place to play hockey was

at Crang’s Pond.

We played with the Wolf brothers,

Upton and Ritch

tightening skates on the

frozen banks

striding onto the ice, clearing

the rink

and choosing sides.

Each game was different:

the swerves, the dekes,

glides, passing

and shooting

—to break through the defense

the breakaway...bearing down

on the goalie

(the way I saw Beliveau or

Mahovlich move)

aiming for a corner by the

boot post

into the snow net.

After the breathy exhaustion of the

sudden death goal

we left our indecipherable

signatures on the dark ice.

We always tried to prolong the

hockey season

despite the water lapping the reedy

pond’s edge.

It was so warm I took off my coat

and gloves

and the ice split not far from us,

getting softer, turning a little gold.

Taking off our coats and gloves

we played the game into the warm

afternoon until

the whole damned pond sagged and

cracked beneath us.

Laurence Hutchman grew up in Emery and attended Gulfstream Public School and Emery Collegiate Institute. He received his PhD at the Université de Montreal in 1988. He has taught at a number of universities including Concordia University, the University of Alberta, The University of Western Ontario, and The Université de Moncton where he was a professor for 23 years.

Hutchman has published eight books of poetry, co-edited Coastlines: The Poetry of Atlantic Canada, and edited a book of interviews In the Writers’ Words: Conversations with Eight Canadian Poets.

He has received numerous grants and won awards including the WFNB’s prize for individual poems and in 2007 he received the Alden Nowlan Award for Excellence.

He has served as Quebec Representative and New Brunswick/ PEI for the League of Canadian Poets and as President of the Writers' Federation of New Brunswick. Hutchman has had many readings and conducted numerous workshops in Canada, the United States, China, Ireland and Bulgaria. He lives with his partner, the painter Eva Kolacz in Oakville.