Beyond Remembering: The Collected Poems of Al Purdy

Rating:
Summary: One of Canada's finest
Review: One of the last things Al Purdy worked on before his death last year (1999? or was it 2000? I forget the exact date) was a definitive edition of his collected poems; he helped select these, and wrote a preface. Coming just a few years after a previous anthology of his work, this edition incorporates much material from Purdy's later years, including his touching and apt lament for his friend Charles Bukowski. All the Purdy poems that I've come to love over the years are here; he writes with humour, warmth, and a delightful curmudgeonism, and with a great awareness of region and history, as they inform his experience of life in Canada. There are many very funny moments, like "When I sat down to play the piano," about Purdy being accosted by dogs with an "inexplicable taste for human excrement" when attempting to take a bowel movement in the snow in the Canadian north; but also much that is profoundly moving and true. Purdy's great gift is to take a mundane experience, rooted in a very concrete particular, and make of it something of universal human significance (for example, "Flat Tire in the Desert," which is about mortality). He was one of Canada's finest writers and this bookk is a worthy testament to that.