Product Description

By the time Al Purdy succumbed to lung cancer at his waterfront home in Sidney BC on April 21, 2000, he was universally acknowledged to be one of the greatest writers Canada has produced. In five decades as a published author he had produced over forty books and received innumerable distinctions, including two Governor General's Awards and the Order of Canada. A hands-on writer who delighted in co-producing specialty publications and small press titles in addition to his major collections with leading publishers, Purdy left a massive and diverse body of work, much of it long unavailable to the public.

The Collected Poems, edited by Purdy critic Sam Solecki with the full participation of the author, for the first time brings all of Purdy's poetic writings together in one volume, including all his later books, work previously uncollected from earlier periods as well as several excellent new poems he completed in the months before his death. It is, as he said, everything he wished to be remembered for.

---

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #57990 in Books
• Published on: 2000-10-01
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 1.91" h x 6.60" w x 9.47" l, 2.29 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 608 pages

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

About the Author
Save the Al Purdy A-Frame Campaign
The Canadian League of Poets has declared a
National Al Purdy Day!



Al Purdy was born December 30, 1918, in Wooler, Ontario and died at Sidney, BC, April 21, 2000. Raised in Trenton, Ontario, he lived throughout Canada as he developed his reputation as one of Canada's greatest writers. His collections included two winners of the Governor General's Award, Cariboo Horses (1965) and Collected Poems (1986)
and other classics such as Poems for All the Annettes, In Search of Owen Roblin and Piling Blood. Later in life, he travelled widely with his wife Eurithe and settled in Ameliasburg, Ontario and Sidney, BC. In addition to his thirty-three books of poetry, he published a novel, an autobiography and nine collections of essays and correspondence. He was appointed to the Order of Canada in 1983 and the Order of Ontario in 1987. His ashes are buried in Ameliasburg at the end of Purdy Lane.

Sam Solecki is a professor of English at the University of Toronto and a former editor of The Canadian Forum.He is also editor of Beyond Remembering: The Collected Poems of Al Purdy, Starting from Ameliasburgh: The Collected Prose of Al Purdy and Rooms for Rent in the Outer Planets: Selected Poems 1962-1996. His most recent books are Ragas of Longing: The Poetry of Michael Ondaatje and The Last Canadian Poet: An Essay on Al Purdy.

Margaret Atwood is the author of more than thirty books of fiction, poetry, and critical essays. Her novels include The Edible Woman, Surfacing, The Handmaid's Tale, Cat's Eye, The Robber Bride, Alias Grace and the winner of the Booker Prize, The Blind Assassin. Her work is acclaimed internationally and has been translated into thirty-three languages. She is the recipient of many literary awards and honours from various countries, including Britain, Italy, France, Sweden, and Norway, as well as Canada and the United States. Margaret Atwood lives in Toronto with writer Graeme Gibson.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
FOREWORD by Margaret Atwood
I began to read Al Purdy's poetry about the same time it changed from being odd and ungainly to being remarkable - in the early sixties. I was just into my twenties, writing a lot of poetry but not liking much of it; like most young poets then, I wanted to be published by Contact Press - a highly respected poet-run co-operative - and I read everything issued by it; and thus I read Purdy's Poems for All the Annettes in 1962, when it first came out.
I was somewhat frightened by it, and did not fully understand it. This was a new sort of voice for me, and an overpowering one, and a little too much like being backed into the corner of a seedy bar by a large, insistent, untidy drunk, who is waxing by turns both sentimental and obscene. For a young male poet of those days, this kind of energy and this approach - casual, slangy, subversive of recent poetic convention - could be liberating and inspirational, and some found in him an ersatz father figure. But for a young female poet - well, this was not the sort of father figure it would be altogether steadying to have.

Then, in 1965, The Cariboo Horses - Purdy's breakthrough book - came out, and I found that the drunk in the bar was also a major storyteller and mythmaker, though still wearing his offhand and indeed rather shabby disguise. This is poetry for the spoken voice par excellence - not an obviously rhetorical voice, but an anecdotal voice, the voice of the Canadian vernacular. Yet not only that either, for no sooner has Purdy set up his own limits than he either transcends or subverts them. Purdy is always questioning, always probing, and among those things that he questions and probes are himself and his own poetic methods. In a Purdy poem, high diction can meet the scrawl on the washroom wall, and as in a collision between matter and anti-matter, both explode.

It would be folly to attempt to sum up Purdy's poetic universe: like Walt Whitman's, it's too vast for a precis. What interests him can be anything at all, but above all the wonder that anything at all can be interesting. He's always turning banality inside out. For me, he's above all an explorer - pushing into nameless areas of landscape, articulating the inarticulate, poking around in dusty corners of memory and discovering treasure there, digging up the bones and shards of a forgotten ancestral past. When he's not capering about and joking and scratching his head over the idiocy and pain and delight of being alive, he's composing lyric elegies for what is no longer alive, but has been - and, through his words, still is. For underneath that flapping overcoat and that tie with a mermaid on it and that pretence of shambling awkwardness - yes, it's a pretence, but only partly, for among other things Purdy is doing a true impersonation of himself - there's a skillful master-conjurer. Listen to the voice, and watch the hands at work: just hands, a bit grubby too, not doing anything remarkable, and you can't see how it's done, but suddenly, where a second ago there was only a broken vase, there's a fistful of brilliant flowers.


FOREWORD by Michael Ondaatje
We were very young and he was hitting his stride - Poems for All the Annettes, The Cariboo Horses. There had been no poetry like it yet in this country. Souster and Acorn were similar, had prepared the way, but here was a voice with a "strolling" not "dancing" gait or metre, climbing over old fences in Cashel township... (And who ever wrote about "township lines" in poems before Al did?)
And with this art of walking he covered greater distances, more haphazardly, and with more intricacy. Cashel and Ameliasburg and Elzevir and Weslemkoon are names we can now put on a literary map alongside the Mississippi and The Strand. For a person of my generation, Al Purdy's poems mapped and named the landscape of Ontario, just as Leonard Cohen did with Montreal and its surroundings in The Favourite Game.

We were in our twenties (and I speak for my friends Tom Marshall and David Helwig, who were there with me) and we didn't have a single book to our names; we were studying or teaching at the university in Kingston.

. . . And Al and Eurithe simply invited us in. And why? Because we were poets! Not well-known writers or newspaper celebrities. Did Kipling ever do that? Did D.H. Lawrence? Malcolm Lowry had done that for "Al- something or other" in Dollarton, years earlier. These visits became essential to our lives. We weren't there for gossip, certainly not to discuss royalties and publishers. We were there to talk about poetry. Read poems aloud. Argue over them. Complain about prosody. We were there to listen to a recording he had of "The Bonnie Earl of Murray." And sometimes we saw Al's growing collection of signed books by other Canadian poets. (My favourite dedication among them was "To Awful Al from Perfect Peggy.")

All this changed our lives. It allowed us to take poetry seriously. This happened with and to numerous other young poets all over the country, right until the last days of Al Purdy's life. He wasn't just a "sensitive" man, he was a generous man.

Most of all we should celebrate his fervent, dogmatic desire to write poetry. A glass-blower makes money. A worm-picker has a more steady income. Al, a man who had the looks and manner of a brawler, wanted to be a poet. And what is great is that he was a bad poet for a long time and that didn't stop him. That's where the heroism comes in.
And when he became a good, and then a great poet, he never forgot the significance and importance of those bad poets - they were rather like those small homes and farms north of Belleville, "a little adjacent to where the world is," and about to sink into the earth. He had been there. It gave his work a central core of humbleness, strange word for Al. It resulted in the double take in his work, the point where he corrects himself.

"I have been stupid in a poem..."

As he was not ashamed to whisper in a poem - this in a time of mid-century bards. Al never came with bardic trappings.
"Who is he like?" you ask yourself. And in Canada there is no one.

I can't think of a single parallel in English literature. It almost seems a joke to attempt that. He was this self-taught poet from up the road. What a brave wonder.
So how do we respond to all that Al was and stood for?
The great Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid, who was pretty close to Al in some ways, had by the time of his death become the embodiment of what his country's culture was, and stood for, and stood against. Fellow Scottish poet Norman MacCaig recognized MacDiarmid's contribution by saying: "Because of his death, this country should observe two minutes of pandemonium."


Table of Contents
Foreword by Margaret Atwood 17
Foreword by Michael Ondaatje 19
Preface 21

THE FIFTIES
The Crafte So Long to Lerne (1959)
At Evergreen Cemetery 25
From the Chin P'ing Mei 25
On the Decipherment of "Linear B" 26
Whoever You Are 27
Where the Moment Is 27
Love Song 28
Gilgamesh and Friend 29
At Roblin Lake 30

THE SIXTIES
Poems for All the Annettes (1962)
Poem for One of the Annettes 35
Postscript [1962] 36
Archaeology of Snow 37
The Listeners 41
For Norma in Lieu of an Orgasm 42
Spring Song 44
The Quarrel 45
O Recruiting Sergeants! 46
Evergreen Cemetery 47
Mind Process re a Faucet 49
Rural Henhouse at Night 50
Indian Summer 51
Remains of an Indian Village 51
The Blur in Between (1962)
Night Song for a Woman 53
Pause 54
The Old Woman and the Mayflowers 54
The Machines 55
Winter Walking 56
The Cariboo Horses (1965)
The Cariboo Horses 57
Thank God I'm Normal 59
Percy Lawson 59
Song of the Impermanent Husband 61
Mountain Lions in Stanley Park 63
Mice in the House 64
Lu Yu 64
Winter at Roblin Lake 65
In Sickness 65
Sestina on a Train 67
Necropsy of Love 68
Complaint Lodged with LCBO
by a Citizen of Upper Rumbelow 69
Old Alex 70
Hockey Players 71
Home-Made Beer 74
One Rural Winter 75
Roblin's Mills 77
The Country North of Belleville 79
Country Snowplow 81
What It Was - 82
The Viper's Muse 83
Death of John F. Kennedy 84
Fidel Castro in Revolutionary Square 86
Late Rising at Roblin Lake 88
Peonies Beside the Lake 88
Helping My Wife Get Supper 89
My Grandfather Talking - 30 Years Ago 90
Method for Calling Up Ghosts 91
The Old Girl Friend 92
Postscript [1965] 93
Transient 95
North of Summer (1967)
The North West Passage 97
Arctic Rhododendrons 99
Eskimo Graveyard 100
Trees at the Arctic Circle 102
Metrics 104
Tent Rings 107
Still Life in a Tent 109
When I Sat Down to Play the Piano 112
What Can't Be Said 114
Dead Seal 115
HBC Post 117
The Sculptors 118
At the Movies 120
Washday 121
What Do the Birds Think? 123
The Country of the Young 126
Poems for All the Annettes, Revised Edition (1968)
News Reports at Ameliasburg 127
House Guest 128
At the Quinte Hotel 130
Notes on a Fictional Character 132
Wild Grape Wine (1968)
The Winemaker's Beat-Étude 133
Detail 135
The Beach at Varadero 136
Dream of Havana 137
Hombre 138
Shoeshine Boys on the Avenida Juarez 141
Watching Trains 143
Shopping at Loblaws 145
Poem for Eda 147
Further Deponent Saith Not 147
Attempt 149
Love at Roblin Lake 150
Dark Landscape 150
Interruption 153
My '48 Pontiac 154
Roblin's Mills [II] 156
Wilderness Gothic 158
Boundaries 159
Lament for the Dorsets 160
The Runners 162
The Road to Newfoundland 164
Over the Hills in the Rain, My Dear 166
Private Property 167
About Being a Member of Our Armed Forces 168
Sergeant Jackson 169
Autumn 171
Skeleton by an Old Cedar 172
"Old Man Mad about Painting" 173
Death of a Young Poet 174
The Drunk Tank 176
Joe Barr 177

THE SEVENTIES
Love in a Burning Building (1970)
Poem 181
Married Man's Song 181
Idio... (Forewords by Atwood and Ondaatje and Table of Contents )