For so many of us poets, the passing of Sandy Shreve earlier this year has spurred much reflection, and numerous thoughtful tributes to our beloved colleague:
Rob Taylor’s interview in EVENT with several of Shreve’s colleagues and friends.
https://bcbooklook.com/rip-sandy-shreve-1950-2026/ (BC Bookworld tribute)
Catherine Owen's tribute in periodicities- Feb 11th
Read Local BC’s tribute (Asna Shaikh)
Writers' Union of Canada- Kate Braid's tribute to her dear friend
Although I had never had the privilege of meeting her, her passing has given me pause to appreciate her work writing and activism, and to consider her outsized influence on Canadian work poetry.
Shreve was a union and community organizer, and she wrote unflinchingly about the reality of women’s work and working conditions from her perspective as a university and arts administrator. According to SFU’s Special Collections and Rare Books Archives, “in 1987, she was an organizer of the first Vancouver Mayworks Festival of Working People and the Arts, which celebrated workers’ contributions through artistic expression and sought to build ties between the labour movement and cultural workers.” She edited Working for A Living, a special double issue of Growing Room Collective (now Room), 1988: vol 12 #s 2 & 3 of writing by women about their work. In her first collection, The Speed of the Wheel is Up to the Potter, there’s a section titled ‘Crumpled Smiles’ in which Shreve illustrates how administrative work (traditionally performed by women) is devalued by society.
In ‘That Magic Touch’, she describes a colleague’s typing skills with reverence and flair:
and what remains
is the perfection of her fingers
caressing the keyboard–
the melody and rhythm
of pauses, complementing phrases
allegretto, andante, spiritoso
and on the next page, in “White-Out”, there’s sublimated anger after a man higher up the chain devalues her effort:
Comments how, although
perhaps a bore, HE
sometimes
wouldn’t mind my job:
just sit all day and copy
someone else’s work!
Furious
the fingers grip
liquid paper
bloated brush
poised
Interestingly, Shreve also captured some of the nuances of all-male work environments. In Waiting for the Albatross, Shreve created found poems gleaned from her father Jack Shreve’s journals, which he kept as a young deckhand on a Canadian Steamships freighter in 1936. Here, we see her meticulous fascination with form: crown of sonnets, ghazal, madrigal, pantoum, terzanelle, triolet and villanelle all appear, with lines that reappear to mirror the repetitive nature of life on a freighter.
In “Called: 2”, her use of repetition underscores the unrelenting drudgery (punctuated by danger, interpersonal or weather-related drama, and humour) of the crew’s daily tasks. Almost every stanza begins with the phrase ‘Called at 6’:
Called at 6. Shovelling ashes till about 10.30
then started polishing brass.
Called at 6 and started cleaning winches. Talk about
your dirty, greasy jobs!
Called at 6. Quite calm and yet there’s a heavy swell.
…Great fun. Just like a rollercoaster!
Recently, I was fortunate enough to attend the Vancouver Industrial Writers’ Union’s 40th year reunion in May. Shreve was an original member of this work-writing group, (which was active between 1979-1993), and produced the anthologies Shop Talk, and More than Our Jobs. In celebration, all the heavy hitters– Kate Braid, Tom Wayman, David Conn, Zoe Lansdale, Kirsten Emmott, and Calvin Wharton each read one of her poems that evening.
What I find rather curious is how few work-themed poetry anthologies have been released in Canada since the VIWU years, but Hustling Verse (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2019) and the recent I’ll Get Right on It: Poems on Working Life in the Climate Crisis (Fernwood Publishing, 2025) spring to mind. There were some themed issues from the journals: Prairie Fire’s (‘Work Matters’ Vol 40, No 1, Spring 2019), and Arc’s work-themed issue (‘Labour and Livelihood’, No 90, Fall 2019) in which Tom Wayman laments in his essay ‘Get Real: The Worth and Current Status of the Literature of the Future—Work Writing’, “[a]t present, you can thumb through virtually any literary magazine, attend any literary festival, browse any bookstore or bookfair or anthology of Canadian literature and you are offered a literary portrait of a country in which nobody works”.
I’ve said for some time that we’re due for a new wave of work poetry– especially in these interesting times. The nature of work itself is being reshaped by AI/ surveillance technology, wealth concentration, and climate change. It’s daunting to consider, but I’m hopeful that we’ll see a renewed culture of work poetry in response to these existential shifts– one that builds upon the foundation Shreve and her VIWU colleagues have generously laid. Thank you, Sandy.
Christina Shah lives in New Westminster and works in heavy industry, where she drinks from the firehose of knowledge. Her poetry has appeared numerous Canadian literary journals, including The Fiddlehead, Vallum, Arc, Grain, PRISM international, EVENT, The Malahat Review, The Antigonish Review and elsewhere. Her poem, ‘they canned a good man today’, was shortlisted for The Fiddlehead’s 2021 Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize. Her poem, ‘interior bar, 1986’, was selected for Best Canadian Poetry 2023. She is one-fifth of the Harbour Centre 5 poetry collective, whose chapbook, Brine, was released in 2022. Her first videopoem, ‘rig veda’ (in collaboration with videographer Mark Mushet), was translated into Spanish and screened at the 2023 Cinemística festival in Granada, Spain, and the 2023 Versi Di Luce festival in Modica, Sicily. rig veda, her first solo chapbook (Anstruther Press), was released in 2023. if: prey, then: huntress (Nightwood Editions, 2025) is her first full-length collection. She has some strong opinions on soft pretzels.
Sandy Shreve photo credit: Kim Gilker.
