Corner Brook -
A doctor and poet with strong connections to western Newfoundland died in Vancouver last week.
Dr. Goh Poh Seng died of pneumonia at the age of 73 in St. Paul's Hospital's palliative care unit Jan. 10.
Dr. Goh was born in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and received his medical education in Dublin, Ireland. He worked in Singapore as a doctor for about 25 years, then left in 1986, heading to Canada.
After about a year in Vancouver an opportunity came up for Dr. Goh to come to Newfoundland. He spent time practising medicine in Cow Head where he made contact with Al and Marilee Pittman. Their families became fast friends.
Around 2002 Dr. Goh and his wife Margaret, a native of Singapore, bought a piece of property in Lark Harbour where they spent their summers and a couple of winters until 2008 when Dr. Goh's Parkinsons disease made living in Lark Harbour too difficult.
Marilee Pittman described Dr. Goh as a brave soul, who was warm, bright, love to laugh, was open, creative and a wonderful writer.
"They were a remarkable family who had a worldly cultural experience and fell head over heels in love with Newfoundland," Pittman said. "They were passionate about this place.
"His recent poetry is all about Newfoundland, about the geography of Newfoundland."
They had a legendary love of partridge berries, which was expressed in a farewell poem in a Lark Harbour/York Harbour newsletter.
The couple didn't drive and would get rides from their many friends to Corner Brook for poetry readings and other activities.
Marlaine Childs, a Lark Harbour businesswoman, remembers Dr. Goh's energy, vitality, persistence, courage and big ideas.
To her, he was a brilliant man. He often told her he was getting his drivers licence back, never turning his back on the dream of driving once again.
"I think I would have liked to have known him as a younger man," Childs said. "He had so much energy, so many ideas and things he wanted to do at a late age, and so much non-stop travel he wanted to do. He must have been a force to reckon with to keep up with when he was young."
Childs said Dr. Goh appreciated every day spent in Lark Harbour. He loved the freedom the Bay of Islands community offered and loved picking any kind of berry, and enjoyed snowmobiling.
"If there was snow, he saw beauty in it," she said. "If there was rain, he saw beauty in it.
"Plants, flowers, to him everything was poetry, absolutely poetry - something to write about."
