Beyond Remembering: The Collected Poems of Al Purdy

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian Studies at
Concordia University and an avid outdoor recreationist. She is the
author of several books, including The Mountain Is Moving: Japanese
Women’s Lives, Kurlek and Margaret Laurence: T

Al Purdy, author of more than 40 books and winner of innumerable awards,
has a special place in the hearts and minds of Canadians. His phrasing,
in verse as in prose, is colloquial, strong, and deceptively plain. In
her foreword, Margaret Atwood confesses to finding the “new sort of
voice” in his first volume, Poems for All the Annettes (1962), to be
intimidating, overpowering. By The Caribou Horses (1965), the voice was
“Canadian vernacular.” Purdy was an explorer, “a skillful
master-conjuror.”

In another foreword, Michael Ondaatje credits Purdy with putting
Canadian place names on the international literary map; with
sensitivity, generosity, and heroism; with having “a central core of
humbleness” in his work.

Conversely, Purdy’s work also has grandeur. In Purdy’s own short
preface, he begins, “This is my last book ... I’ve reached age 80,
and I started to write at 13 ... Anyway, yes, it was a life. I
wouldn’t have wanted any other.” The book concludes with a 1986
essay by Purdy that, like all good writing, is simultaneously personal
and universal.

Editor Sam Solecki notes that Beyond Remembering contains the poems
Purdy considered to be his best, arranged chronologically. He and Purdy
agreed on the selection. This collection is an important work of great
beauty and significance, a volume best left bed-side and savored slowly,
over a lifetime.