Al Purdy
Al Purdy's Poems for
All the Annettes is a collection that resists being defined by any
particular stylistic element because Purdy's style varies so considerably
between its poems. He is at times lyrical and reflective, as in
"Whoever You Are," where he writes,
Clouds must be clouds always, even if
they've not decided what to be at all,
and trees trees, stones stones, unnoticed,
the magic power of anything is gone.
But sometimes when the moonlight disappears,
with you in bed and nodding half awake,
I have not known exactly who you were,
and choked and could not speak your name...
In other poems, like
"Archaeology of Snow" or "Love Poem," he employs a more
visual style, making use of the space on the page to convey the sense of the
poem, and the collection also contains examples of his conversational poems,
like "At the Quinte Hotel" and "The Listeners," which
begins with the memorable lines, spoken in a bar by a man who looks like a
truck driver, “I might have married her once but/being an overnight guest of
hers changed my mind—”
What unifies these various
styles, and what makes Poems for All the Annettes a coherent whole
despite them, is the quiet but irresistible sense that every poem is a part of
Purdy's own life, that they are not artistic exercises or aesthetic experiments,
but an integral part of his living, inseparable from it. This is where
their unity lies, so that the style of each poem seems merely to be the form
closest at hand, the one best able to say what Purdy needs to be said, less
significant as a stylistic statement than as a poetic vehicle for a unique
moment that he has lived.
It is in this sense of
interconnection with the poet's life that I think Purdy's value as a poet
primarily lies for us today, in his ability to write poetry that speaks to a
lived life rather than to some stylistic fad, because although there are
certainly those who are writing poetry in Canada, and although there are even
those who read it, there is very little sense that poetry in Canada is relevant
to what is often but wrongly called the commonplace events of our lives. There
is instead an overwhelming impression that poetry is the domain of academics
and artists, at home only in classrooms and in reading groups.
Purdy's poetry opposes
this entirely, not by speaking overtly against it, but by being entirely
different from it. His poems are poems of the pub and the bedroom and the
grocery store and the dock and the home. They were written there, and they
are best read there. It is a poetry that refuses to be separate from the
life it describes, a poetry that has made itself at home wherever life is
lived, and this is how poetry needs to be understood once again.
This is why I welcome
House of Anansi's reprint of Poems for All the Annettes in their A List series: because
Purdy's poetry should be a model for us—not in its style necessarily, even if
it could be described as a single style—but in its willingness to inhabit the
life it describes, to be neither obscure nor faddish, but to reveal how
uncommon the apparently common things of our lives really are.
- Luke Hill
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