Victoria's poet laureate remembers late great Al Purdy The Martlet

03.12.09

In 1957, Al Purdy bought an empty lot in sylvan Ontario and built an A-frame cottage with his wife. The lot cost $800 — two-thirds of his savings — and the A-form was constructed out of concrete blocks from a demolished government building in Belleville.

For food, the couple sometimes scrounged for closed cans at a military dump. Purdy had to hack through three feet of ice to get water in the winter.

Purdy, who died in the spring of 2000, was a self-taught versifier and trailblazer in Canadian literature. He has published 33 books of poetry, a novel, an autobiography and nine collections of essays.

The Al Purdy A-Assemble Anthology (Harbour, 2009) is a celebration of his life.

Purdy’s A-frame cottage was not only a sanctuary for his own writing to ripen from, but a place where poets came together to create a part of the poetic landscape that defined that latter half of the 20th century.

The regulations contains anecdotes and poems from over 20 Canadian writers. It’s also a collection of Purdy’s own work, revealing a intelligence of place where Purdy put down his roots and grew into one of Canada’s greatest poets.

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