To Paris Never Again

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.

Though already known to many of his fellow poets, Al Purdy burst onto
the Canadian literary scene in 1965 with the publication of The Cariboo
Horses. Since then he has become one of the most popular and respected
of Canadian poets, and “the Purdy poem” has become almost
proverbial—a seemingly casual, colloquial, irreverent, meditative poem
containing profound but for the most part homely philosophical
undertones.

Since 1965, collections of Purdy’s latest verse have appeared every
two or three years, and To Paris Never Again is the most recent. It is a
characteristic Purdy production—so much so that I found myself
wondering when a distinctive style lapses into a mannerism. No one
acquainted with modern Canadian poetry could mistake these poems for the
work of anyone else. At the same time, I doubt that any of them will
take their place alongside such classic Purdy poems as “The Country
North of Belleville,” “Trees at the Arctic Circle,” “Wilderness
Gothic,” or “Lament for the Dorsets.”

The poems in the present collection—including a long and ambitious
travel poem, “In Mexico”—are compulsively readable without being
particularly memorable. And they sometimes descend to the prosaic, as in
the opening of “Realism 2—after Czeslaw Milosz”: “Paintings
certainly do have / ‘lastingness’ / as Milosz tells us, / but you
can add sculpture as well, / and various other works of art, / in fact
nearly every human artifact.” That sounds like mere sliced prose to
me. On the other hand, the beginning of “After the War”—“Late in
the Bronze Age: / guardsmen lounging at the Lion Gate / discussing
Helen’s sexual preferences”—has the ring of Purdy at his best,
with its marvelous blending of archeological subject matter and a
chirpily contemporary tone.

As a whole, To Paris Never Again does not represent Purdy at the top of
his form, but it will be a must for all his many admirers.