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List Price: $44.95
Our Price: $34.16
Your Save: $ 10.79 ( 24% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Publisher: Harbour
Written By: Al Purdy
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Average Reader Rating: 
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 811.54
EAN: 9781550172256
Format: Unabridged
ISBN: 1550172255
Label: Harbour
Manufacturer: Harbour
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 608
Publication Date: 2000-10-01
Publisher: Harbour
Studio: Harbour
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Editorial Review:
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By the time Al Purdy succumbed to lung cancer at his waterfront home in Sidney BC on April 21, 2000, he was universally acknowledged to be one of the greatest writers Canada has produced. In five decades as a published author he had produced over forty books and received innumerable distinctions, including two Governor General's Awards and the Order of Canada. A hands-on writer who delighted in co-producing specialty publications and small press titles in addition to his major collections with leading publishers, Purdy left a massive and diverse body of work, much of it long unavailable to the public. The Collected Poems, edited by Purdy critic Sam Solecki with the full participation of the author, for the first time brings all of Purdy's poetic writings together in one volume, including all his later books, work previously uncollected from earlier periods as well as several excellent new poems he completed in the months before his death. It is, as he said, everything he wished to be remembered for.
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Reader Reviews for Beyond Remembering: The Collected Poems of Al Purdy:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: One of Canada's finest
Comment: 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.
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