The Ivory Thought: Essays on Al Purdy.

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

This book reprints papers presented at a conference at the University of Ottawa in 2006. Such gatherings tend to be frustratingly uneven, but in this case (with the exception of two memoirs that I found more embarrassing than helpful) these essays are informed, learned, and for the most part readily understandable even if the reader lacks the expertise of the speaker.

That acknowledged, I have to state that two of the more pressing problems relating to Purdy and his work were raised but not resolved.

First, the matter of length. Beyond Remembering (2000), the gathering not of all Purdy’s poetry but all that he personally felt worth preserving, runs to 600 fairly large pages. Yet Dean Irvine calls for a larger collection that resurrects the Carman-like rhyming poems that Purdy renounced for what most poets would consider proper reasons, and also wants multiple versions of poems that Purdy continued to revise and rewrite in the course of a long life. But poems are read to be enjoyed and savoured, not dissected and pored over. That is for scholars. General readers cannot afford to spend an inordinate time even on a poet as impressive as Purdy; there are other rewarding writers in Canada and in the rest of the world. Surely 600 pages is (perhaps more than) enough.

Second, too many contributors are revealingly unreliable on the subject of evaluation. Two writers subject a passage in the well-known “Lament for the Dorsets” to strong criticism. When the about-to-become-extinct Dorsets are imagined as scratching their heads “with hairy thumbs” and “saying to each other plaintively / ‘What’s wrong? What happened?’” the lines are dismissed as “extraordinarily mawkish” and “infelicitous.” Yet the clumsiness is clearly deliberate, and I for one find the scene intensely moving—especially the sublimely simple, final “And died,”—though for one critic it is “particularly unfortunate.” Chacun à son goût? By no means. These academics are neither listening nor feeling adequately. There are certainly dull, even banal passages in Purdy—but not here.

Purdy’s response would have been unprintable. Still, this is a collection worth reading.