Beyond Remembering: The Collected Poems of Al Purdy
608Beyond Remembering: The Collected Poems of Al Purdy
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Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9781550172256 |
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Publisher: | Harbour Publishing Company, Limited |
Publication date: | 10/01/2000 |
Pages: | 608 |
Product dimensions: | 6.60(w) x 9.47(h) x 1.91(d) |
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.
Read an Excerpt
FOREWORD by Margaret AtwoodI 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 OndaatjeWe 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 ContentsForeword by Margaret Atwood 17Foreword by Michael Ondaatje 19Preface 21THE FIFTIESThe Crafte So Long to Lerne (1959)At Evergreen Cemetery 25From the Chin P'ing Mei 25On the Decipherment of "Linear B" 26Whoever You Are 27Where the Moment Is 27Love Song 28Gilgamesh and Friend 29At Roblin Lake 30THE SIXTIESPoems for All the Annettes (1962)Poem for One of the Annettes 35Postscript [1962] 36Archaeology of Snow 37The Listeners 41For Norma in Lieu of an Orgasm 42Spring Song 44The Quarrel 45O Recruiting Sergeants! 46Evergreen Cemetery 47Mind Process re a Faucet 49Rural Henhouse at Night 50Indian Summer 51Remains of an Indian Village 51The Blur in Between (1962)Night Song for a Woman 53Pause 54The Old Woman and the Mayflowers 54The Machines 55Winter Walking 56The Cariboo Horses (1965)The Cariboo Horses 57Thank God I'm Normal 59Percy Lawson 59Song of the Impermanent Husband 61Mountain Lions in Stanley Park 63Mice in the House 64Lu Yu 64Winter at Roblin Lake 65In Sickness 65Sestina on a Train 67Necropsy of Love 68Complaint Lodged with LCBO by a Citizen of Upper Rumbelow 69Old Alex 70Hockey Players 71Home-Made Beer 74One Rural Winter 75Roblin's Mills 77The Country North of Belleville 79Country Snowplow 81What It Was - 82The Viper's Muse 83Death of John F. Kennedy 84Fidel Castro in Revolutionary Square 86Late Rising at Roblin Lake 88Peonies Beside the Lake 88Helping My Wife Get Supper 89My Grandfather Talking - 30 Years Ago 90Method for Calling Up Ghosts 91The Old Girl Friend 92Postscript [1965] 93Transient 95North of Summer (1967)The North West Passage 97Arctic Rhododendrons 99Eskimo Graveyard 100Trees at the Arctic Circle 102Metrics 104Tent Rings 107Still Life in a Tent 109When I Sat Down to Play the Piano 112What Can't Be Said 114Dead Seal 115HBC Post 117The Sculptors 118At the Movies 120Washday 121What Do the Birds Think? 123The Country of the Young 126Poems for All the Annettes, Revised Edition (1968)News Reports at Ameliasburg 127House Guest 128At the Quinte Hotel 130Notes on a Fictional Character 132Wild Grape Wine (1968)The Winemaker's Beat-Étude 133Detail 135The Beach at Varadero 136Dream of Havana 137Hombre 138Shoeshine Boys on the Avenida Juarez 141Watching Trains 143Shopping at Loblaws 145Poem for Eda 147Further Deponent Saith Not 147Attempt 149Love at Roblin Lake 150Dark Landscape 150Interruption 153My '48 Pontiac 154Roblin's Mills [II] 156Wilderness Gothic 158Boundaries 159Lament for the Dorsets 160The Runners 162The Road to Newfoundland 164Over the Hills in the Rain, My Dear 166Private Property 167About Being a Member of Our Armed Forces 168Sergeant Jackson 169Autumn 171Skeleton by an Old Cedar 172"Old Man Mad about Painting" 173Death of a Young Poet 174The Drunk Tank 176Joe Barr 177THE SEVENTIESLove in a Burning Building (1970)Poem 181Married Man's Song 181Idiot's Song 182Joint Account 183The Quest for Ouzo (1971)At the Athenian Market 184Hiroshima Poems (1972)Remembering Hiroshima 185On the Bearpaw Sea (1973, 1994) 187Sex & Death (1973)Tourist Itinerary 195Melodrama 196Flying Over Africa 197The Jackhammer Syndrome 200Depression in Namu, BC 202Arctic Romance 203Eastbound from Vancouver 203A Graceful Little Verse 205Dead March for Sergeant MacLeod 206Wartime Air Base 207Picture Layout in Life Magazine 208The Horseman of Agawa 209Temporizing in the Eternal City 211Hands 213In the Caves 214Flat Tire in the Desert 218The Battlefield at Batoche 219The Beavers of Renfrew 222Wilf McKenzie 225Excess of Having 226The Time of Your Life 227The Peaceable Kingdom 230Intruder 233For Robert Kennedy 234Power Failure in Disneyland 235In Search of Owen Roblin (1974) 238Sundance at Dusk (1976)Lament 274Kerameikos Cemetery 275The Hunting Camp 275Inside the Mill 277Pre-School 278The Children 279Deprivations 281In the Darkness of Cities 283Alive or Not 285Antenna 286Paper Mate 287Subject/Object 289The Colour of Reality 291Borderlands 291Separation 292Place of Fire 293Ten Thousand Pianos 294Shall We Gather at the River 295"I Am Searching for You" 297Rodeo 299Homage to Ree-Shard 300At Marsport Drugstore (1977)Pour 303A Handful of Earth (1977)The Death Mask 305Along the Ionian Coast 306Funeral 308In the Dream of Myself 309Starlings 310A Handful of Earth 311Prince Edward County 313Being Alive (1978)Monastery of the Caves 315On Realizing He Has Written Some Bad Poems 316After Rain 317THE EIGHTIESThe Stone Bird (1981)The Dead Poet 323Journey to the Sea 324On the Hellas Express 325Bestiary 326D.H. Lawrence at Lake Chapala 328In the Garden 331Birdwatching at the Equator 332Moses at Darwin Station 333Darwin's Theology? 336Moonspell 337Near Tofino, Vancouver Island 338Shot Glass Made from a Bull's Horn 339Red Fox on Highway 500 340The Nurselog 343Spinning 344May 23, 1980 345The Darkness 346Arctic Places 348Fathers 349Near P�tzcuaro 350Mantis 351Bursting into Song (1982)Orpheus in Limbo 352Piling Blood (1984)Piling Blood 353Menelaus and Helen 355At Mycenae 359Voltaire 360Lost in the Badlands 362In the Beginning Was the Word 367Seal People 369Iguana 370Adam and No Eve 372Birds and Beasts 374Dog Song 2 375A Typical Day in Winnipeg 376Vancouver 379Names 380The Blue City 382Double Focus 383Gondwanaland 385Victoria, BC 387Death of DHL 388Lawrence's Pictures 391Bestiary [II] 394Machines 396Museum Piece 399My Cousin Don 401The Boy Accused of Stealing 403The Strangers 405Story 407The Son of Someone Loved - 409Choices 411In Cabbagetown 412The Tarahumara Women 414The Uses of History 415In the Early Cretaceous 418How a Dog Feels to Be Old 420Birds Here and Now 421Collected Poems (1986)Homer's Poem 423Purely Internal Music 425"- Great Flowers Bar the Roads" 426Orchestra 428Yes and No 430This from Herodotus 431On First Looking into Avison's "Neverness" 432Home Thoughts 434Elegy for a Grandfather [1986] 435For Steve McIntyre 437Caesar at Troy 438The Smell of Rotten Eggs 441Pre-Mortem 442THE NINETIESThe Woman on the Shore (1990)The Prison Lines at Leningrad 447Quetzal Birds 448Horses 448Voyeur 450Barn Burning 452Red Leaves 454Orchestra 455Herodotus of Halicarnassus 456On the Flood Plain 459The Others 460On the Death of F.R. Scott 462I Think of John Clare 464Questions 466An Arrogance 467For Margaret 469Lawrence to Laurence 471The Woman on the Shore 472Springtime 473Yellow Primavera in Mexico 473The Gossamer Ending 475Over the Sierra Maestras 476Ulysses Alone 478Naked with Summer in Your Mouth (1994)Grosse Isle 478Home 480Naked with Summer in Your Mouth 482Chac Mool at Chichen Itza 483Woman 484In the Desert 484Earle Birney in Hospital 486Yeats 487The Freezing Music 489Flight of the Atlantis 490Bits and Pieces 491Procne into Swallow 494Insomnia 495Concerning Ms. Atwood 496Procne into Robin 498On My Workroom Wall 499Gary: Self-Portrait 501Pneumonia 502On Being Human 507Seasons 509Do Rabbits -? 510Atomic Lullaby 512Deity 513Country Living 514Wandering through Troy 515Wanting 516Glacier Spell 517The Farm in Little Ireland 518To - 519Fragments 520To Paris Never Again (1997)Lament for Bukowski 521To Paris Never Again 522After the War 525A Job in Winnipeg 526Departures 528Bruegel's Icarus 530The Gods of Nimrud Dag 532Marius Barbeau: 1883-1969 533Listening to Myself 534Machu Pichu 535Untitled 536Minor Incident in Asia Minor 537Her Illness 539134 Front St., Trenton, Ont 540Becoming 542The Names the Names 545On the Beach 546House Party - 1000 BC 548In Turkey 551Herself 552My Grandfather's Country 553Our Wilderness 556In Cannakkale 557For Her in Sunlight 559In Mexico 560In the Rain 572The Stone Bird 573Transvestite 575New Poems (1999)Say the Names 579The Last Picture in the World 580For Ann More 580The Girl at Scara Brae 582Friend 583In Etruscan Tombs 584For Curt Lang 586Her Gates Both East and West 588To See the Shore (Essay) 593Editor's Note 599Index of Titles 601