[.ca] Beyond Remembering: The Collected Poems of Al Purdy (ISBN 1550172255)

Amazon.ca:
Beyond Remembering spans the best years of Al Purdy's long and prolific career, from 1959's The Crafte So Long to Lerne onwards. It is a bulky and rambling volume that seems to address every subject a Canadian poet could care to address: Canadian history from the Cretaceous onward, the recesses of domestic life, travels to Mexico and Russia, D.H. Lawrence, the sex lives of rabbits, and nearly every corner of Canada. Purdy's voice is immediately recognizable, whether he is spinning tall tales, as in "At the Quinte Hotel": I am drinking I am drinking beer with yellow flowers in underground sunlight and you can see that I am a sensitive man And I notice that the bartender is a sensitive man too so I tell him about his beer I tell him the beer he draws is half fart and half horse piss and all wonderful yellow flowers or plunging deep into the pains of intimacy, as in "Married Man's Song": There are rooms for rent in the outer planets and neons blaze in Floral Sask we live with death but it's life we die with in the blossoming earth where springs the rose In house and highway in town and country what's given is paid for blood gifts are sold. In his range (emotional, anecdotal, geographical), Purdy is among the most important Canadian poets of his generation. His writing can show the roughness of the autodidact, and it lopes along in its loose forms, but it is substantial talker's verse, with great integrity and garrulous charm. He rambles, but he gets away with it. Readers unfamiliar with Purdy should first turn to the slim selected volume Rooms for Rent in the Outer Planets, which is a superb introduction to his vast oeuvre. Beyond Remembering will delight Purdy devotees, however, and it is a much-needed replacement for the long-obsolete The Collected Poems of Al Purdy. --Jack Illingworth

One of Canada's finest:
One of the last things Al Purdy worked on before his death last year (1999? or was it 2000? I forget the exact date) was a definitive edition of his collected poems; he helped select these, and wrote a preface. Coming just a few years after a previous anthology of his work, this edition incorporates much material from Purdy's later years, including his touching and apt lament for his friend Charles Bukowski. All the Purdy poems that I've come to love over the years are here; he writes with humour, warmth, and a delightful curmudgeonism, and with a great awareness of region and history, as they inform his experience of life in Canada. There are many very funny moments, like "When I sat down to play the piano," about Purdy being accosted by dogs with an "inexplicable taste for human excrement" when attempting to take a bowel movement in the snow in the Canadian north; but also much that is profoundly moving and true. Purdy's great gift is to take a mundane experience, rooted in a very concrete particular, and make of it something of universal human significance (for example, "Flat Tire in the Desert," which is about mortality). He was one of Canada's finest writers and this bookk is a worthy testament to that.