Author profile: Al Purdy

Al Purdy (1918-2000)

Alfred Wellington Purdy was born in 1918 in Wooler, Ontario. Raised in Trenton, he attended the Trenton Collegiate Institute and Albert College in Belleville before leaving school at the age of 16. Entering the workforce without even having completed high school, Purdy spent the Depression working casual jobs in Ontario and British Columbia, which he reached by riding across the country on freight trains. After serving with the Royal Air Force for six years, Purdy moved to Vancouver with his wife, Eurithe, and spent the first half of the 1950s working at a mattress factory. After a brief move to Montreal, the Purdys settled in Ameliasburg, Ontario. Though Purdy and his wife travelled a lot over the rest of his career, Ameliasburg remained his home and a touchstone in much of his work until his death in 2000.

Purdy's poetry was profoundly influenced by both his working class experiences and his insatiable curiosity regarding history, literature, and the world around him. Early on in his career, he became less concerned with traditional poetic forms and created poetry that was conversational and free of restrictive structures that he felt impeded the freedom of the poetic line. A profoundly erudite yet self-taught man, Purdy's poetry draws on knowledge from all sorts of fields. Yet, while at times it seems to overflow with allusions to everything from Canada's past and its geography to the history of poetry and philosophy, Purdy's work is never so dense as to be inaccessible to many readers.

Commonly referred to as Canada's most peripatetic poet, Purdy travelled and lived across the country and, indeed, all over the world; many of these experiences are captured in his work. It was his many poems on Canada, however, that made him a profound influence on every Canadian poet to come after him. As Lorna Crozier said of Purdy after his death in the spring of 2000, "He mapped Canada poetically, and [his] mapping was as important as any cartographer's. He gave us place to live in his writing."

Purdy began writing poetry as a teenager and published his first chapbook of poems, The Enchanted Echo (1944) when he was in his twenties. It was not until the early 1960s, however, that he was able to stop working odd jobs and truly devote all his energy to being a poet. It was at this time that he began to publish works that he felt showed him coming into his own as a poet.

Volumes such as Poems for All the Annettes (1962), The Blur In Between (1962) and The Cariboo Horses (1965) earned him both critical and popular success, with the latter being awarded a Governor General's Award. Purdy quickly became recognized as one of the most important voices in Canadian poetry and some of his next volumes of poetry, including North of Summer: poems from Baffin Island (1967), Wild Grape Wine (1968), In Search of Owen Roblin (1974), and No Other Country (1977), contained his best and most memorable work.

Purdy continued to write and publish throughout the 1980s and 1990s, producing, among other volumes of new poems, his first novel, A Splinter in the Heart (1990) and a number of volumes of selected and collected poems, including The Collected Poems of Al Purdy (1986), which won Purdy his second Governor General's Award. By his death in 2000, Purdy had published over 600 poems and over 30 volumes of new and selected work. His final new poems were included in Beyond Remembering: the Collected Poems of Al Purdy (2000).

Paul Martin