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Hero of the PlayHockey poet mourns lost NHL season with an ‘NH Elegy’ to the Stanley Cup

Richard Harrison is an award-winning poet and diehard hockey fan. NH Elegy completes a trilogy of poems about the Stanley Cup.

The first was featured in an acclaimed collection of hockey poetry called Hero of the Play in 1994 and the second was published in the 10th anniversary edition of the book last fall.

"Love hockey in all its forms as I do, I still miss the Big League game ," said Harrison, who has written three other books of poetry Big Breath of a Wish, Recovering the Naked Man, and Fathers Never Leave You.

"I feel bitter, saddened and angry, and writing this poem is my way to express those emotions and, I hope, make something positive out of them. The fans have been taken for granted and I think they want to have a say. What’s sad is that all that’s exciting and even noble about hockey – the spectacular plays, last-second wins and losses, stories of players who overcome personal pain and keep going – has taken second place to a battle between businesses."


 

Stanley Cup
At the centre of the circle of the Champions of the
World, Mario Lemieux hoists the Cup, kisses its silver
thigh, the names of men where his will soon be cut
with a finish pure as a mirror; around him, the
tumult. And Scotty Bowman, the winningest coach
in the NHL, named his first son Stanley when his
Canadiens won it in ’73 with a stonewall blueline and
a dizzying transition game. Every player on every
team who ever won the Cup gets to take it home; it
has partied on front lawns, swimming pools and in
the trunks of cars, and even the guy who left it by
the side of the road and drove away, still he thinks
of it as holy. And that word - holy - appears most
in the conversation of veterans who know how the
touch fades, the shoulder takes longer between days
of easy movement, how Bobby Hull passed on his
only chance to drink champagne from its lip when
the Hawks won it ‘61 because he thought there’d be
so many in his life. Some take the Cup apart, clean
the rings, make minor repairs in their basements,
and then inscribe on the inside of the column the un-
official log of their intimate knowledge: This way
I have loved you.

Richard Harrison
From Hero of the Play
(Wolsak & Wynn, 1994)

 

 

 

The View From The Top
Every player on every team who ever won the Cup gets to take it home.
“Stanley Cup”

And at the top of Mount Fisher, 9000 feet up in the Rockies, Scott Niedermayer raises the Stanley Cup above his head. The New Jersey defenceman’s wearing red, the Devils’ colour on the road, but he’s balanced on a slab no bigger than a goal crease over his home town of Cranbrook, B.C., and he grips the rims of the trophy as if it holds him to a point in the stony crown of the whole wide world; I tell you, no jar on a hill in Tennessee ever stopped time and stuffed all the eye can behold into the barrel of itself better than this Cup at the summit of Niedermayer’s arms. What the photographer, helicoptered to the peak behind him, and not far removed, cannot catch on film is his face, the look between a hockey man and his gods exchanged over the giants who slouch their shoulders round the valley where he first set his steel on water frozen calm.

Richard Harrison
From Hero of the Play
10th Anniversary Edition
(Wolsak & Wynn, 1994)
 
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