Introduction:
Simplicity and everyday realism form the very foundation of Al Purdy’s poetry, making his work both accessible and deeply meaningful. Unlike poets who rely on ornate language or abstract themes, Purdy turns his attention to ordinary life—rural landscapes, common people, and routine experiences—and transforms them into powerful poetic expressions.
His language is direct, conversational, and unpretentious, reflecting the rhythms of daily speech while capturing the authenticity of lived experience. Through this simplicity, Purdy reveals profound insights about human nature, identity, and the Canadian landscape. Thus, his poetry stands as a celebration of the commonplace, where the ordinary is elevated into something memorable and artistically significant.
Purdy’s Personality and the Common Man Persona:
Al Purdy as poet is person and persona; there is no escaping the earthy cynical unselfconfident egotistical balding punching middle-aged man, deliberately common and secular. He is also by turns sensitive, boisterous, ironical, whimsical, sentimental, and sententious. Despite the vivacity, the bluster, and the ironic mask, Purdy’s essential stance is sentimental and conservative. Purdy is a personal poet, and his style depends for its effectiveness on an apt use of the speaking voice. He who is speaking is often one of Purdy’s three main personae— the common man, the boisterous man, or the sensitive man. The common man persona is the base persona, the one on which his style stands. This persona is “a greyish drunkish largeish anguished man/with unsung children and tone-deaf wife” (“Mr. Greenhalgh’s Love Poem’) who drinks his coffee from a thick white mug, “the kind I always get/being an ordinary customer” (“Bells”).
The subjects of Purdy’s poetry are common and ostensibly unpretentious— personal experiences, people he has known, domestic scenes. His poetic “place” is not a tower or a grove but a hand-built house out in nowhere. He has debarred himself from the role of “Poet”, and we find him on his back under his old Pontiac (horny), grubbing around a ruined house (chased off), defecating near the pole (savaged by dogs). His poetry when bad is just broken-lined prose, and the faults of his poetry otherwise— triviality, pretension, discursiveness, bathos, bad metaphors— similarly reflect the image of common man. At one point he laments “But I’m a pedestrian this is pedestrian verse/without insights and I don’t like that either” (“A Walk on Welling-to Street”). Much of Purdy’s power as a poet, however, rests in this identification.
The Boisterous and Sensitive Personae:
The boisterous persona, lecherous, rowdy, drunken, accounts for some of his liveliest poetry and provides much of his humour. This persona is a blusterer and a great debunker, given to an amused deprecation of sensitive poets. In opposition to this persona is that of the sensitive man who is characterised well in ‘Night Song for a Woman’.
“All things enter
into me so softly I am
aware of them
not myself
the mind is sensuous
as the body
I am.”
Through this persona Purdy reaches some of the finest moments in his poetry; he reaches too “the still center, /an involvement in silences” (“Winter Walking”), the religious center of his world. A telling encounter between their two personae occurs in “Observer”; here the sensitive Purdy sees patters of beauty in nature, and the boisterous Purdy reacts against such idealisation:
“I curse myself for this madman’s frenzy
that wants to make pretty patterns
cut from life
Tomorrow I’ll get roaring drunk
and tell tremendous lies to myself
for an hour
and wistfully yearn for the sober truth
of these
polygonal dichotomous rectangular hexametric
—trees
and myself
for an hour.”
It is obvious that the boisterous persona does not hold the day, that regret, wistfulness, sensitivity creep back in. The opposition between these two roles represents a conflict basic to Purdy’s poetry. The sensitive rather than the tough voice is the one that predominates.
Human Suffering and Sympathetic Sentimentality:
‘Poem for One of the Annettes’ is an apt introduction to Purdy’s world. Here are the deserted and sad women, crying. “the common sickness with ordinary tears”. The dilemma they face is the dilemma of the world. As Purdy writes in ‘Mr. Greenhalgh’s Love Poem’,
“Nothing is said or can be said. Music
screeches and dies and everyone gets gypped
sooner or later by death or disease or
what’s inside them because the world
is that sort of place……”
Purdy’s solution to the women’s dilemma is, typically, neither sociological nor moral; it is a solution of sentiment, an extension of sympathy. The tears of the women are said to run, finally, to “the sea/the shapeless mothering one-celled sea— /Oh, Anita, they do,” Such a proposition cannot be reduced; it is like an assurance that there really is a home. The poem ‘Sculptors’ betrays even more clearly this tender anguish of Purdy’s (much as his defenses would hate that term). Going through cases of returned, flawed carvings, he has a vision of the carvers themselves:
“The losers and failures
who never do anything right
and never will
the unlucky ones
always on the verge
of a tremendous discovery
who finally fail to deceive
even themselves as time begins
to hover around them
the old the old the old
who carve in their own image
of maimed animals
And I’d like to buy every damned case.”
This sentimentality, this care for the hurt and the flawed, for “the inconsolable/ walkers in the storm/cursing at the locked gates of fact” (“Nine Bean-Rows on the Moon”), is the ground of Purdy’s stance.
Cynicism, Doubt, and the Sense of Human Limitation:
Given the world, a stance such as “that sort of place”, reacts against his own idealism and sentimentality. The difficulty is stated in “I Guess a Poem”, in which Purdy holds in his head, “a small bright area/that speaks man/along with a voice that says/’so what?’.” Purdy cannot escape cynicism and doubt. “O! Recruiting Sergeants”, for instance, is an overt rejection of idealism. Faced with a call to battle for justice, Purdy declines; he is inept, and the cause is hopeless. He finds that
“I’m too much
a bungling little mechanic and
dare not tinker among
the blind engineers of the universe
who work such cruelty and sorrow with
levers extending all the way down here,
and whose complaint dept. has
a dead switchboard—”
Although he acknowledges the heroism of the brave, and encourages them, he himself opts for a worldly cynicism:
“Mine is the commonplace acceptance of good
or evil
(a Persian at Marathon,
a Turk at Lepanto),
the cynicism of
the defeated majority
that wickedly survives
virtue—”
Transience, Loss, and Cultural Memory:
The sense of man’s impotence is accompanied by a sense of the transitory, of man’s continual loss through time. In ‘After the Rats’, Purdy dwells on the dwindling of his self both physically, as the body changes, and morally, as life wears him. In ‘Vestigia’ he laments the passing away of a woman’s beauty with the accretion of fat……”this veritable temporary truth I mourn, /this beauty/which never seen/but only remembered.” The sense of the transitory extends from the very personal to the elegiac, a sense of cultural loss closely associated with the individual’s situation; found in poems such as ‘Country North of Belleville’. Here, on abandoned farms, once the place of a simple but harsh life, “Old fences drift vaguely among trees” and “a pile of moss-covered stones/gathered for some ghost purpose/has lost meaning under the meaningless.” Return is difficult to this “country of our defeat”, for “it’s been a long time since/and we must enquire the way/of strangers.”
Illusion, Religion, and the Search for Meaning:
Against the dilemma of the world, men arm themselves with illusions. They are perhaps necessary, but regrettable; illusions dodge reality, and that is their sole usefulness as well as their danger. A case in point is organised religion—an apparent locus of meaning—and its sheer inadequacy in dealing with death. In ‘Elegy for a Grandfather’ there is a sharp contrast between the clumsy burial service— “a sticky religious voice/folded his century sideways to get it out of sight”—and nature’s gracious reception of the body—“And earth takes him as it takes more beautiful things.” Purdy gets “a grim glee from all the high sounding/old aspirations and cliches ending in damp ground” (“Evergreen Cemetery”).
Absence of God and the Religious Sensibility:
Purdy does not, in lamenting man’s state, rail against God. The “blind engineers of the universe” are merely figures of speech; in only a few poems does God appear, and in none of them does he exist. In ‘Biography’, a pessimistic poem about fall out and the fall of our civilization, Purdy is bitter against “the god I made/(I made him damn it and both regret it)”; this god turns out to be merely a projected mish-mash of civilization’s bad ideas. The absence of God, however, is not the absence of the religious sense. The sensitive search for God is detailed in ‘Listening’. Purdy is in the Arctic, lying with his ear to rock, listening. He listens through the rock down to the below the sea-bottom and on “into another silence/where any impossible sound might be/interpreted as God’s voice”. He listens clear through to the other side of the world. It seems clear, that there is no God to hear. Suddenly a black scream shatters silence. Purdy is shaken and it takes him a moment to realize that it was only a white bird calling and God had not screamed at the world. There is a real sense of desolation here in the implication that had there been a God, he would have screamed at the world; there is also an openness to religious experience. The poem ‘Metrics’ raises the question with somewhat similar results. It begins in a typically autobiographical vein with Purdy’s setting in at a tiny northern hunting camp. A feeling of loneliness invades him and then, on hearing some ducks out on the water, he comes face to face with the absence of God and with the consequent desperation of his position.
Social and Political Outlook: Sympathy over Protest:
The way in which Purdy deals with social and political matters is consonant with and expressive of his sentimental and conservative stance. There have been questions raised as to why Purdy did not return from the North with a notebook full of scathing denunciations of the exploitation of the natives, but rather turned out a book of poems which sought sensitively to comprehend the meaning of what existed. Sometimes Purdy does protest civil injustice, but generally he accepts it as part of experience. He is concerned with the universal human condition and with the personal condition; these concerns are at once too broad and too narrow to yield much protest literature. The normal direction of his concern revealed in such poems of ‘Negroes on St. Antoine’, ‘Bums and Brakies’, and ‘H.B.C. Post’. In ‘Negroes on St. Antoine’, Purdy begins with a description of the decrepit neighbourhood and its people. Instead of dwelling on and protesting the particulars, however, he moves away, to an historical view of the revolt of the subjected, to Israel, Spartacus, Lumumba:
“I have stood on the sweep of Mount Royal,
thinking of Israeli gunners
on the Sinai Peninsula,
farmers with rifles in the Negev
Spartacus
waiting for ships to come and staring
alone across the straits of Messina,
Lumumba dead in Coppery Katanga province
(a janitor on St. Antoine
picked up for questioning)”.
He moves back to the present with this perspective; the point of the janitor is that he had nothing to do with Lumumba at all, nor with that sort of effort. He laments that the Negroes here lack just the perspective he has provided— “human history is meaningless/ on this non-involved mountain.” What bothers Purdy is not the economic and social conditions but the historical, psychological condition; cut off from a perspective on the past, the Negroes here are unable to deal with the present, are cut off from it too (the noise of the building of the cultural center does not reach them). In ‘Bums and Brakies’, he is concerned not that the men have too little to eat but that they have too little to feel and that they have lost their sense humanity. He takes exploitation of the natives for granted in ‘H.B.C. Post’, he is interested not in the injustice but in the fall of high expectations—a more universal condition of the heart, and one calling for Purdy’s sympathy, for his sentimental sensitivity, rather than for his indignation.
Universalising Political Vision and Critique of Modernity:
Purdy’s political poems are likewise notable for this universalising tendency. One of the most specific of these, ‘In the Wilderness’, a poem about the persecution of the Doukhobors, has at its care not this particular cause but a general (and personal) statement about human aspiration. This care is in parentheses and stands dead centre in the poem:
“(Talking to Big Fanny
making notes for an article
I think of coeval saints and ascetics and
the ordinary people with such
bright illusions of extraordinary freedom those
troublemakers of God:
……………………………………………………
— I wonder how it feels to have you plodding
pedestrian mind sprout wings and fly
handsome as an actor playing Icarus
towards the cold sun truth)—”
The Ottawa poems are universalized by the introduction of the natural world, which has the function of minimizing the importance of the political. In ‘The Torn Country’, for instance, the pettiness and divisiveness of men is contrasted to nature’s eternal, beautiful, uniting process.
Critique of Capitalism and Modern Civilization:
Purdy attacks upon capitalism and upon the modern world in general are similarly motivated. Capitalism distorts human values; it robs life of its proper direction and it robs the individual of dignity. Indian woman in ‘On the Avenida Juarez’, hoarse, splay-footed, shouting out lottery tickets for sale “like a deaf tomcat” is such a victim of capitalism:
“She has certainly been sacrificed
to Quetzalcoatl
God of Civilization
whose lineal descendants are
Imperial Oil Co.
and Coco Cola
but her ritual death is
unreasonably prolonged.”
To the modern world in general is attributed a lack of manliness, of experience and appreciation of the reality of the world. In ‘Boundaries’ he contrasts the soft names of well-settled areas— “the mannered expressionless areas, which urban names/mark settled boundaries”—with those of the unsettled have “the still rich/vulgarity to match/a man-breaking country”, in which one can feel “the edge of our loneliness”. Modern culture breaks inan off from the natural world, uproots him; it is as much a violation of the individual’s integrity as capitalism is. The nostalgia, and the appeal simultaneously to the universal and to the value of the individual life, which characterise Purdy’s political and social- protest poems, have the same sympathetic and philosophic base as the sensitive caring, the doubt, and the sense of desolation of such poems as ‘Poem for one of the Annettes’ and ‘Nine Beans-Rows on the Moon’.