Morning and It's Summer: A Memoir

Robert Seiler was Assistant Professor of General Studies at the University of Calgary.

Alfred Wellington Purdy (b. 1918) has enjoyed a long and a distinguished career. Since 1944 he has published 27 volumes of verse. He has won many awards, among them the Governor General’s Medal for Poetry (1966) and the Order of Canada (1982). Critics speak of him as a peripatetic literary journalist who fixes his attention on people and places but who gets caught up in lives and landscapes. It may be true that Purdy travels widely and that in his poetry he reports on the human condition, but it must be remembered that the originality and the power of his voice constitute his great strength as a writer.

Over the years Purdy has evolved a distinctive manner of writing. The word that is often used to describe his style is minimalist. The run-on sentence, the unexpected but appropriate adjective, the repetition of present participles and, of course, the galloping gait inform not only his poetry but also his prose, as Morning and It’s Summer demonstrates. This is a remarkable book indeed. For one thing, the journey Purdy takes is the journey to the mythical world he grew up in during the 1920s. He files two reports, the first in prose and the second in poetry. For another, reproductions of photographs of his childhood friends and of members of his family are carefully worked into the prose section of the book. What results is a memorial volume of considerable intensity.

Purdy claims that no great effort of mind is needed to reconstruct the great moments of life: “the best parts of life are the exultations, those times when something happens which so moves one emotionally that everything else is driven into the far background of the mind” (pp.26-27). Naturally, his memories of the people of Trenton, Ontario, during the 1920s are linked with memories of specific places. These include the red brick house, the floors of which sagged, as if the house was tired from its 100 years and couldn’t stand upright any longer (p.9); the B.W. Powers coal sheds, out of which struggled great teams of drayhorses, “their wagons loaded with canvas bags of coal, delivered by black-faced sweating men to the town stoves and furnaces” (p. 10); and Weller’s Theatre, where on Saturday afternoon every child in Trenton watched Tom Mix ride the range (p. 19). People as well as places are sharply observed. Witness the sketches of Purdy’s grandfather, a taciturn old man who “seemed less a relative than a queer aging animal from forests where other animals had avoided him” (p. 12); Jacob Merker, the junk dealer who told stories “of his adventures out west among the Indians, when he was a cowboy working on a cattle ranch” (p.16); and Joe Barn, the town idiot who “lived in a shack made of flattened tin cans and broken boards somewhere near the town garbage dump” (p.22).

The second half of the book brings together the best of Purdy’s poems about his childhood. These poems, including “Elegy for a Grandfather,” “Evergreen Cemetery,” and “My Grandfather Talking,” first appeared in a slightly altered version in such volumes as Emu, Remember! (Fredericton, 1957), Poems for all the Annettes (Toronto, 1962) and The Cariboo Horses (Toronto, 1965), Purdy’s prize-winning volume. It can be argued that at least three poems from this volume shaped Morning and It’s Summer “Method for Calling Up Ghosts” suggests the method by which Purdy imagines people from his past and then makes them visible again; lines 43 to 46 of “In Sickness” contain the book’s title; and the description of the country of his birth in “The Country North of Belleville” anticipates the description of Trenton.

The mode of discourse shifts from narration to rumination in this part of the book. To be more precise, in the poems Purdy reflects on the experiences that have made him what he is today, a visionary poet who sees through time and space and who “pictures” in his mind the faces and the attributes of the people who have made an impact on him. “My Grandfather Talking” is a good example of how a face or a gesture or an attitude can be transported to the here and now:

Not now boy not now

some other time I’ll tell ya what it was like

without no streets

or names of places here

nothin but moonlight boy nothin but woods (p.30)

It should be obvious that the portraits in this volume, especially those of his grandfather and his mother, achieve a marked degree of actuality.

It is regrettable that the exigencies of commercial publishing today prevent the publication of a volume that would bring together all of Purdy’s best work. Such a volume would run to well past the critical limit, 300 pages. Sad to say, his readers must be satisfied with collections like Morning and It’s Summer.