Naked with Summer in Your Mouth

Bruce Meyer teaches English at Trinity College, University of Toronto.

In this latest volume, raconteur, traveler, historian, and ironist Al
Purdy honors the late Milton Acorn (“my friends die off one by one,”
the poet laments), a dying Earle Birney, and the folksinger Stan Rogers,
who died in the Air Canada tragedy in Cincinatti. He also takes a
playful potshot at Margaret Atwood in “Concerning Ms. Atwood.” Yet
one has a sense that Purdy’s vision is growing darker, that the irony
of the early poems is slipping away. The final poem of the collection
begins with the line, “I loved being alive.” The reader is left with
the sense that the poet is slowly bowing to the pressures of mortality
and the need for self-eulogization.