The More Easily Kept Illusions: The Poetry of Al Purdy

by Alfred Purdy, Robert Budde

Much-loved, cantankerous, and brilliant, Al Purdy galloped across the Canadian literary landscape for decades, grandly embodying the self-taught and hard-living image of the 1960s and ’70s poet. The More Easily Kept The Poetry of Al Purdy is a selection of thirty-five poems that includes some of his best-loved and unearths lost and ignored treasures. Robert Budde introduces the collection with an overview of Purdy’s tumultuous life of letters, his legendary personality, his outrageous antics, his peers, his influences, and the history of his publishing career. Reorganizing Purdy’s body of work, this collection also re-interprets the chronological and thematic development of his writing. Choosing poems for a book like this is necessarily an act of literary criticism and Budde takes care to balance the various critical attentions that have structured the historical responses to Purdy’s work. The selected poems will mix lesser-known gems with Purdy’s greatest hits. Teachers, poetry-lovers, students, and writers will rediscover Purdy’s unique voice. Those who are new to his work will get a full and rich sense of the man some have called the last Canadian poet. Also includes an Afterword by Russell Morton Brown.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published January 3, 2006

About the author

Alfred Wellington Purdy was one of the most popular and important Canadian poets of the 20th century. Purdy's writing career spanned more than fifty years. His works include over thirty books of poetry; a novel; two volumes of memoirs and four books of correspondence. He has been called the nation's "unofficial poet laureate".

Born in Wooler, Ontario Purdy went to Albert College in Belleville, Ontario, and Trenton Collegiate Institute in Trenton, Ontario. He dropped out of school at 17 and rode the rails west to Vancouver. He served in the Royal Canadian Air Force during World War II. Following the war, he worked in various jobs until the 1960s, when he was finally able to support himself as a writer, editor and poet.

Honours and awards Purdy received include the Order of Canada (O.C.) in 1982, the Order of Ontario in 1987, and the Governor General's Award, in 1965 for his collection The Cariboo Horses, and again in 1986 for The Collected Poems of Al Purdy. The League of Canadian Poets gave Purdy the Voice of the Land Award, a special award created by the League to honour his unique contribution to Canada.

Al Purdy died in North Saanich, B.C., on April 21, 2000. His final collection of poetry, Beyond Remembering: The Collected Poems of Al Purdy, was released posthumously in the fall of 2000.

On May 20, 2008, a large bronze statue of Purdy was unveiled in Queen's Park in downtown Toronto.

Reviews

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sometimes I see churches
like tons of light,
triangles and hexagons
sideways in air.
Sometimes an old house
holds me watching, still,
with no idea of time,
waiting for the grey shape
to reassemble in my mind,
and I carry it away
(translated back
to drawing board, concept,
mathematic and symbol);
I puzzle myself
with form and line
of an old house
that goes where man goes.
A train's violent anapest
(- - ---- ! - - ---- !)
cries in my ears,
and leaves me a
breathless small boy.
What entered me trembling
was not the steel's dream.
And walking by,
in a pile of old snow
under a high wall
a patch of brilliant
yellow dog piss
glows, and joins
things in the mind.
Sometimes I stand still,
like a core at the centre
of my senses, hidden and still -
all the heavy people,
clouds and tangible buildings,
enter the pass thru me:
stand like a spell
of the wild gold sunlight,
knowing the ache stones have,
how mountains suffer,
and a wet blackbird feels
flying past in the rain.
This is the still centre,
an involvement in silence -

- Winter Walking, pg. 5-6

* * *

I am drinking
I am drinking 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
so I tell him the beer he draws
is half fart and half horse piss
and all wonderful yellow flowers
But the bartender is not quite
so sensitive as I supposed he was
the way he looks at me now
and does not appreciate my exquisite analogy
Over in one corner two guys
are quietly making love
in the brief prelude to infinity
Opposite them a peculiar fight
enables the drinkers to lay aside
their comic books and watch with interest
while I watch with interest
a wiry little man slugs another guy
then tracks him bleeding into the toilet
and slugs him to the floor again
with ugly red flowers on the tile
three minutes later he roosters over
to the table where his drunk friend sits
with another friend and slugs both
of em ass-over-electric-kettle
so I have to walk around
on my way for a piss
Now I am a sensitive man
so I say to him mildly as hell
“You shouldn’ta knocked over that good beer
with them beautiful flowers in it”
So he says “Come on”
So I Come On
like a rabbit with weak kidneys I guess
like a yellow streak charging
on flower power I suppose
& knock the shit outa him & sit on him
(he is just a little guy)
and say reprovingly
“Violence will get you nowhere this time chum
Now you take me
I am a sensitive man
and would you believe I write poems?”
But I could see the doubt in his upside down face
in fact in all the faces
“What kind of poems?”
“Flower poems”
“So tell us a poem”
I got off the little guy but reluctantly
for he was comfortable
and told them this poem
They crowded around me with tears
in their eyes and wrung my hands feelingly
for my pockets for
it was a heart-warming moment for literature
and moved by the demonstrable effect
of great Art and the brotherhood of people I remarked
“-the poem oughta be worth some beer”
It was a mistake in terminology
for silence came
and it was brought home to me in the tavern
that poems will not really buy beer or flowers
or a goddam thing
and I was sad
for I am a sensitive man

- At the Quinte Hotel, pg. 22-23

* * *

The eagle's passage sings there
crossing the sky on a high wire
salmon leap to find their other selves
black bear amble to breakfast at the river
the sun floats thru a blue notch in the hills

There was never a time
I did not know about such a place
to match the imagined place in my mind
- bu I have lived too long somewhere else
and beauty bores me without the slight ache
of ugliness that makes me want to change things
knowing it's impossible

- Depression in Namu, BC, pg. 33

* * *

It's a building where men are still working
thru sunlight and starlight and moonlight
despite the black holes plunging down
on their way to the roots of the earth
no danger exists for them
transparent as shadows they labour
in their manufacture of light

I've gone there lonely sometimes
the way I felt as a boy
and something lightened inside me
- old hands sift the dust that was flour
and the lumbering wagons returning
afloat int heir pillar of shadows
as the great wheel turns the world

When you cross the doorway you feel them
when you cross the places they've been
there's a flutter of time in your heartbeat
of time going backward and forward
if you feel it and perhaps you don't
but it's voyaging backward and forward
on a gate in the sea of your mind

When the mill was torn down I went back there
birds fumed into fire at the place
a red sun beat hot in the stillness
they moved there transparent ass mourning
one illusion balanced another
as the dream holds the real in proportion
and the howl in our hearts to a sigh

- Inside the Mill, pg. 41

* * *

I am ashamed of you
my poems
you owe me something more
than you've given recently
my poems
you have forgotten your duty
which is to make me important
your function in this life
to march ahead of me
with fife and drum and skirling pipes
to encourage my own halting steps
my poems
your obligation is to cause people
to look at you and glimpse between your lines
indistinct and ambiguous my own face
enigmatic almost majestic certainly wise
my poems
your responsibility is to lie about me and exaggerate me
allow me to bask in the esteem of a million readers
of a million in one
and so to shine under their focused intense regard
that my fossilized flesh will precede my dying
preclude my loving replace my actual living
(and that other
the jewelled hunchback in my head
seated brooding in a dark bone corner
who will not be placated
by some reward
he too has ambitions
- different ones - )
my poems
you have betrayed your creator
I would discard you deny you condemn you
and since the life I have given you is not required
the love I poured forth on you has not brought children
I will abandon you in some gutter blown by the wind
until the long rains beat on you and snow shall blur your meaning
with noon heat night cold on the swaying space ship earth while the morning star
shines over your graves
my poems you have failed
but when I have recovered from
this treachery to myself
I shall walk along the hills chanting
and celebrate my own failure
transformed to something else

- On Realizing He Has Written Some Bad Poems, pg. 48-49

* * *

He knows me and does not
know me and the fatal
facility for transposing
myself into another someone
ends with me peering out
from his eyes into my eyes
and dizzily thinking
My God! My God!
I have stopped being Me!

But calmer now:
he knows me and does not
know me and I am coloured
shadow in sunlight
his brow furrowed and puzzled
with his effort of not knowing
poems he's written and not written
yet that will never be
and he smiles in memory
what might be memory
of whatever smiling was
and it is somehow left for me
to write them remembering pain
of not writing beyond
this grey land of nowhere
forgetting the pain before
beautiful verb and handsome noun
agreed to live together
for better or worse somehow
and kicked their heels
in the printed word
while the shadow stranger waits
the strange shadow

- Earl Birney in Hospital, pg. 67