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Al Purdy’s ashes
are buried in Ameliasburg, Ontario, Canada. (The Al
Purdy memorial statue can be found in the east side of
Toronto’s Queen’s Park.)
Al Purdy's grave (Photo
by Howard White)
Purdy is
celebrated as a working-class, deeply nationalist
Canadian poet. While he had little formal education, he
drew on a wealth of life experience to build a writing
career that earned him a reputation as one of Canada’s
greatest poets.
Born Alfred
Wellington Purdy on December 30, 1918, in Wooler, ON,
and raised in Trenton, Purdy attended Albert College but
dropped out at age seventeen to ride the rails to
Vancouver. This would begin a lifetime of travelling
from coast to Canadian coast, spending most of his
earlier years as an itinerant labourer. During World War
II, Purdy served in the Royal Canadian Air Force.
Ultimately these
experiences became the foundation of Purdy’s poetry, on
which he developed a voice that spoke the language of
everyday Canadians. As a constant traveller with roots
in a working-class culture and a deep sense of Canadian
nationalism, Purdy cultivated an 'open, colloquial and
contemporary style' that gave 'voice to the vernacular
idiom of ordinary Canadians'.
Dedicated to
becoming a poet since age thirteen, Purdy finally became
able to support himself exclusively on his writing when
he reached his forties. Over the span of his career he
published thirty-three books of poetry, a novel, an
autobiography, and nine collections of essays and
correspondences. Purdy’s work has been highly
recognized, most notably receiving the Governor
General’s Award twice - once for The Cariboo Horses
in 1965 and again for The Collected Poems of Al Purdy
in 1986 - as well as being appointed the Order of Canada
in 1983 and the Order of Ontario in 1987.
He died of lung
cancer on April 21, 2000 in Sidney, BC. |
