Peter Trower

Works by Peter Trower:

• Rough and Ready Times: The History of Port Mellon With Peter Trower
• Moving Through Mystery
• Bush Poems
• Dead Man's Ticket
• Goosequill Snags
• Haunted Hills and Hanging Valleys: Selected Poems 1969-2004
• The Judas Hills
• Unmarked Doorways
• There Are Many Ways
• Hitting the Bricks
• A Ship Called Destiny: Yvonne's Book
• Ragged Horizons
• Chainsaws in the Cathedral: Collected Woods Poems

From ABC BookWorld, "Peter Trower was born at St. Leonard's-on-Sea, England, on August 25, 1930. He immigrated to British Columbia at age ten, following the death of his test-pilot father in a plane crash. He arrived on an evacuee ship with his mother and brother to stay with an aunt on Nelson Street in the West End of Vancouver. His mother married a West Coast pulp mill superintendent who drowned soon after.

Peter Trower quit school for financial reasons to work as a logger for twenty-two years. He also worked as a surveyor, smelter worker, pulp-mill hand, shakecutter and baker. He says he began writing seriously in late 1950s after an abortive fling at professional cartooning. As a writer, he fraternized with John Newlove at the Alcazar Hotel in the Sixties "and forced bad poetry upon him, some of which he was charitable enough to read." There he also met poets Milton Acorn and Al Purdy, both influences and comrades. Since 1971, Trower published more than a dozen books of poetry and contributed to numerous issues of Raincoast Chronicles and Vancouver Magazine. Among his supportive early influences were editor Mac Parry of Vancouver magazine and publisher Howard White. His two most important influences were his mother, Mary Cassin, who pushed him to write from an early age and critiqued his drafts until her death and Sunshine Coast writer Ted Poole After publishing his first collection of poems in 1969, Trower quit logging and went to work for Raincoast Chronicles as an Associate Editor in 1971. Peter Trower, dubbed a "logger poet" early in his writing career, received the eighth George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award for an Outstanding Literary Career in British Columbia in 2002. In December of 2015, the town of Gibsons decided to name Trower Lane in his honour." He presented at the Sunshine Coast Festival of the Written Arts, Sechelt in 1998. He passed away at Inglewood Care Centre, West Vancouver.