The Collected Poems of Al Purdy

Alan Thomas is a professor of English at the University of Toronto.

The Enchanted Echo, a book of verse, was published by a Vancouver printer in 1944 for a tall, young airforce man, Al Purdy, who was making this first assertion of his literary self far from his native region, the Eastern Counties of Ontario. The poet developed slowly in command and range through the ‘40s and ‘50s and did not come into full growth until the ‘60s when it was realized that a major figure had arrived on the scene. Purdy won the Governor General’s Award in 1965 and has written on and on, prolific, assured and easy in the anecdotal, personal voice he has achieved through the hard years of what Dennis Lee calls his “late-blooming, interminable, and heroic apprenticeship.” The helpful afterword by Lee argues that Purdy’s Echo of 1944 was in a decaying tradition which the poet had first to abandon and allow to fall silent in order to hear himself and learn his strengths. This he did in virtual isolation, like a home carpenter building shelves in the basement. His base was a house at Roblin Lake, Prince Edward County; his income was supplied by a working wife, Eurithe; and the literary stimuli, or influences, he acknowledges were D.H. Lawrence, Irvin Layton, and, he adds, Milton Acorn.

This is a large book, both in the story it contains and in the contents, nearly 300 poems, which are the ones, editor Russell Brown tells us, Purdy wishes to preserve. The arrangement is chronological, though Brown warns that Purdy has been an inveterate reviser. The designers have chosen a gracefully compact typeface to accommodate the large number of poems and, evidently for the same reason, have run the poems end-to-end through the pages, leaving a minimum of white space. Legibility has not been lost in this packing and the effect is pleasingly workmanlike and unpretentious. The book has won an award since appearance, recognition that it can be seen as the most significant collection of poetry to be published in the past year.