Beyond Remembering: The Collected Poems of Al Purdy

Description

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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Sight Words

Description

Is your child having difficulty with reading simple books? Are sight words difficult for them to remember? If you answered yes, then this book is for you. This book consists of 342 sight words and sight word sentences to aid your child with learning their sight words quickly and reading them as well. This book has been made to be fun, creative and entertaining.

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My First Reading Book (Top 171 Essential Sight Words & Sentences)

Description

Do you want to ensure that your child is at the top of the class? Do you want your child to start off with a solid learning foundation? If you answered yes... Your child needs this book.

A collection of the top 171 sight words for pre-school thru second grade. We have assembled this list and coupled it with easy to read sentences to both emphasize and reinforce the learning process.

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Rooms for Rent in the Outer Planets: Selected Poems 1962-1996

Description

A selection of poems by the man described by the Globe & Mail as "the greatest of our poets." Rooms for Rent in the Outer Planets includes three decades' worth of thought-provoking work, including poems from the Governor-General's Award-winning The Cariboo Horses to Naked with Summer in Your Mouth.

Purdy personally made this selection, assisted by Sam Solecki, the editor of Starting from Ameliasburgh: The Collected Prose of Al Purdy. In these poems, Purdy ponders the remains of a Native village; encounters Fidel Castro in Revolutionary Square; curses a noisy cellmate in the drunk tank; and marvels at the "combination of ballet and murder" known as hockey, all in the author's inimitable man-on-the-street style.

Rooms for Rent in the Outer Planets is destined to become the standard Purdy poetry volume for many years to come.

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The Al Purdy A Frame Anthology

Description

This is a book with a mission. On one level it is a celebration of the great Canadian poet Al Purdy by eminent writers who were his contemporaries. It is also part of a campaign to preserve the place that was the centre of Purdy's writing universe--his home, a lakeside A-frame cottage in Ameliasburgh, Ontario, where he and his wife Eurithe lived for 43 years. The cottage was one of the most important crossroads on Canada's literary map, a kind of tribal mustering place for notable Canadian writers from the 1950s to the 1990s including Margaret Laurence, Milton Acorn, Patrick Lane, Tom Marshall, Scott Symons, R. G. Everson, H. R. Percy, Lynn Crosbie, Michael Holmes, Maggie Helwig and a host of others. This book collects anecdotes, reminiscences, and poems by a roll call of Canadian writers about memorable days and nights spent at the A-frame, along with a selection of Purdy's own writing showing the depth of his feeling for the place where he put down his roots.
Eurithe Purdy says Al was always his most productive at the A-frame. "Despite the caviar receptions and gold accolades, he always returned to this jury-rigged little A-frame tacked to a low-slung, leaning bungalow. The whole edifice, he observed, 'bent a little in the wind and dreamt of the trees it came from.' Here, he could observe all his poetry's recurring themes: love, death, ego, 'the glories of copulation.'" Proceeds from The Al Purdy A-Frame Anthology will go towards preserving the Purdy home as a retreat for future generations of Canadian writers.

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Starting from Ameliasburgh: The Collected Prose of Al Purdy

Description

During the years Al Purdy was becoming one of Canada's best-loved poets, he also wrote and published many pages of distinctive prose. This selection of almost forty years of essays and anecdotes is vintage Purdy. Part I, No Other Country, consists of essays on seeing the world as a Canadian. It begins as a fascinating travel diary as Purdy takes the reader riding the rails through the Depression-era West, continues to Labrador to search for two lost Inuit hunters, and covers an astonishing variety of points between. Part II, The Writing Life, offers distinctive personal takes on the work of Charles Bukowski, Margaret Atwood, Irving Layton, Peter Trower, Bliss Carman and Rudyard Kipling, as well as touching personal memoirs of friends such as Milton Acorn, Malcolm Lowry and Earle Birney. Part III reviews poets from from Raymond Souster to bill bissett, and ends with a tribute to Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. Even in Purdy's sidetrips to the Galapagos Islands and the former Soviet Union, the spirit that permeates Starting from Ameliasburgh is passionately Canadian. "There is a tireless runner in my blood," Purdy writes, "that encircles the borderlands of Canada through the night hours, and sleeps when day arrives. Then my mind awakes and the race continues... This is what I was and what I became...The map of my country, the carography of myself." Whether describing Newfoundland fishermen cod-jigging for the body of a comrade killed by a whale, or Milton Acorn "ranting untranslatable PEI lobster jargon," or Roderick Haig-Brown "writing his first book longhand in school scribblers, while devil's club thorns pop out of his arms and shoulders," Purdy's prose crackles with the vitality of a mind that is never at rest.

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