Starting from Ameliasburgh: The Collected Prose of Al Purdy

by Alfred Purdy

During the years Al Purdy was becoming one of Canada's best-loved poets, he also wrote and published many pages of distinctive prose. This selection of almost forty years of essays and anecdotes is vintage Purdy. Part I, No Other Country , consists of essays on seeing the world as a Canadian. It begins as a fascinating travel diary as Purdy takes the reader riding the rails through the Depression-era West, continues to Labrador to search for two lost Inuit hunters, and covers an astonishing variety of points between. Part II, The Writing Life , offers distinctive personal takes on the work of Charles Bukowski, Margaret Atwood, Irving Layton, Peter Trower, Bliss Carman and Rudyard Kipling, as well as touching personal memoirs of friends such as Milton Acorn, Malcolm Lowry and Earle Birney. Part III reviews poets from from Raymond Souster to bill bissett, and ends with a tribute to Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. Even in Purdy's sidetrips to the Galapagos Islands and the former Soviet Union, the spirit that permeates Starting from Ameliasburgh is passionately Canadian. "There is a tireless runner in my blood," Purdy writes, "that encircles the borderlands of Canada through the night hours, and sleeps when day arrives. Then my mind awakes and the race continues... This is what I was and what I became...The map of my country, the carography of myself."

Whether describing Newfoundland fishermen cod-jigging for the body of a comrade killed by a whale, or Milton Acorn "ranting untranslatable PEI lobster jargon," or Roderick Haig-Brown "writing his first book longhand in school scribblers, while devil's club thorns pop out of his arms and shoulders," Purdy's prose crackles with the vitality of a mind that is never at rest.

400 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1995

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.