Download More Easily Kept Illusions, The: The Poetry of Al Purdy by Al Purdy, Robert Budde PDF

By Al Purdy, Robert Budde

Much-loved, cantankerous, and awesome, Al Purdy galloped around the Canadian literary panorama for many years, grandly embodying the self-taught and hard-living photo of the Sixties and ’70s poet. The extra simply saved Illusions: The Poetry of Al Purdy is a range of thirty-five poems that comes with a few of his best-loved and finds misplaced and overlooked treasures.

Robert Budde introduces the gathering with an outline of Purdy’s tumultuous lifetime of letters, his mythical character, his outrageous antics, his friends, his affects, and the historical past of his publishing profession. Reorganizing Purdy’s physique of labor, this assortment additionally re-interprets the chronological and thematic improvement of his writing. deciding on poems for a ebook like this is often unavoidably an act of literary feedback and Budde takes care to stability many of the severe attentions that experience established the old responses to Purdy’s paintings. the chosen poems will combine lesser-known gem stones with Purdy’s maximum hits. academics, poetry-lovers, scholars, and writers will rediscover Purdy’s distinct voice. those who find themselves new to his paintings gets an entire and wealthy experience of the guy a few have referred to as the final Canadian poet.

additionally contains an Afterword through Russell Morton Brown.

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Extra resources for More Easily Kept Illusions, The: The Poetry of Al Purdy

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Let’s say his name was Kadluk and watch him sitting there carving 2-inch ivory swans for a dead grand-daughter taking them out of his mind where pictures are He selects a sharp stone tool to gouge a parallel pattern of lines on both sides of the swan holding it with his left hand bearing down and transmitting his body’s weight from brain to arm and right hand and one of his thoughts turns to ivory The carving is laid aside in beginning of darkness at the end of hunger 30 / The More Easily Kept Illusions and after a while wind blows down the tent and snow begins to cover him After 600 years the ivory thought is still warm The Poetry of Al Purdy / 31 Joint Account The myth includes Canada, inside the brain’s small country: my backyard is the Rocky Mountain trench —wading all summer in glacier meltwater, hunters with flint axes stumble south— I take deed and title to ancient badlands of Alberta around Red Deer: and dinosaurs peer into Calgary office buildings— Dead Beothucks of Newfoundland track down my blood; Dorsets on the whale-coloured Beaufort Sea carve my brain into small ivory fossils that show what it was like to be alive before the skin tents blew down — The slope of mountain breast and the wind’s words, the moon’s white breathing —these are hers: her eyes’ black flashing are the continent’s anger —my letters fall to silence at her land’s white foot, and waves have washed away her answer — In the long body of the land I saw your own, the mountain peaks, the night of stars, the words I did not speak, and you did not, that yet were spoken — But reality is an overdrawn bank account, my myths and cheques both bounce, the creditors close in; and all the dead men, chanting hymns, tunnel towards me underground.

A two-headed calf born in the barn last night? A sharp female agony? An age and a faith moving into transition, The Poetry of Al Purdy / 27 the dinner cold and new-baked bread a failure, deep woods shiver and water drops hang pendant, double-yoked eggs and the house creaks a little — something is about to happen. Leaves are still. Two shores away, a man hammering in the sky. Perhaps he will fall. 28 / The More Easily Kept Illusions Lament for the Dorsets (Eskimos extinct in the 14th century ad) Animal bones and some mossy tent rings scrapers and spearheads carved ivory swans all that remains of the Dorset giants who drove the Vikings back to their long ships talked to spirits of earth and water —a picture of terrifying old men, so large they broke the backs of bears so small they lurk behind bone rafters in the brain of modern hunters among good thoughts and warm things and come out at night to spit on the stars The big men with clever fingers who had no dogs and hauled their sleds over the frozen northern oceans awkward giants killers of seal they couldn’t complete with little men who came from the west with dogs or else in a warm climatic cycle the seals went back to cold waters and the puzzled Dorsets scratched their heads with hairy thumbs around 1350 ad —couldn’t figure it out went around saying to each other plaintively “What’s wrong?

26 / The More Easily Kept Illusions Wilderness Gothic Across Roblin Lake, two shores away, they are sheathing the church spire with new metal. Someone hangs in the sky over there from a piece of rope, hammering and fitting God’s belly-scratcher, working his way up along the spire until there’s nothing left to nail on — Perhaps the workman’s faith reaches beyond: touches intangibles, wrestles with Jacob, replacing rotten timber with pine thews, pounds hard in the blue cave of the sky, contends heroically with difficult problems of gravity, sky navigation and mythopoeia, his volunteer time and labour donated to God, minus sick benefits of course on a non-union job— Fields around are yellowing into harvest, nestling and fingerling are sky and water borne, death is yodelling quiet in green woodlots, and bodies of three young birds have disappeared in the sub-surface of the new county highway— That picture is incomplete, part left out that might alter the whole Dürer landscape: gothic ancestors peer from medieval sky, dour faces trapped in photograph albums escaping to clop down iron roads with matched greys: work-sodden wives groping inside their flesh for what keeps moving and changing and flashing beyond and past the long frozen Victorian day.

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