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

by Purdy, Al; Solecki, Sam

• ISBN13: 9781550171488
• ISBN10: 1550171488
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1996-01-01
• Publisher: Harbour

Summary

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. Purdy personally made this selection, assisted by Sam Solecki. 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. This book is destined to become the standard Purdy poetry volume for many years to come.

Author Biography

Save the Al Purdy A-Frame Campaign
The Canadian League of Poets has declared a
National Al Purdy Day!



Al Purdy was born December 30, 1918, in Wooler, Ontario and died at Sidney, BC, April 21, 2000. Raised in Trenton, Ontario, he lived throughout Canada as he developed his reputation as one of Canada's greatest writers. His collections included two winners of the Governor General's Award, Cariboo Horses (1965) and Collected Poems (1986)
and other classics such as Poems for All the Annettes, In Search of Owen Roblin and Piling Blood. Later in life, he travelled widely with his wife Eurithe and settled in Ameliasburg, Ontario and Sidney, BC. In addition to his thirty-three books of poetry, he published a novel, an autobiography and nine collections of essays and correspondence. He was appointed to the Order of Canada in 1983 and the Order of Ontario in 1987. His ashes are buried in Ameliasburg at the end of Purdy Lane. Sam Solecki is a professor of English at the University of Toronto and a former editor of The Canadian Forum.He is also editor of Beyond Remembering: The Collected Poems of Al Purdy, Starting from Ameliasburgh: The Collected Prose of Al Purdy and Rooms for Rent in the Outer Planets: Selected Poems 1962-1996. His most recent books are Ragas of Longing: The Poetry of Michael Ondaatje and The Last Canadian Poet: An Essay on Al Purdy. Save the Al Purdy A-Frame Campaign
The Canadian League of Poets has declared a
National Al Purdy Day!



Al Purdy was born December 30, 1918, in Wooler, Ontario and died at Sidney, BC, April 21, 2000. Raised in Trenton, Ontario, he lived throughout Canada as he developed his reputation as one of Canada's greatest writers. His collections included two winners of the Governor General's Award, Cariboo Horses (1965) and Collected Poems (1986)
and other classics such as Poems for All the Annettes, In Search of Owen Roblin and Piling Blood. Later in life, he travelled widely with his wife Eurithe and settled in Ameliasburg, Ontario and Sidney, BC. In addition to his thirty-three books of poetry, he published a novel, an autobiography and nine collections of essays and correspondence. He was appointed to the Order of Canada in 1983 and the Order of Ontario in 1987. His ashes are buried in Ameliasburg at the end of Purdy Lane.

Table of Contents

The Dead Poet (from The Stone Bird, 1981)	11	(1)
Poems for All the Annettes (1962)	12	(7)
Spring Song	12	(1)
Remains of an Indian Village	13	(2)
At the Quinte Hotel	15	(2)
House Guest	17	(2)
The Cariboo Horses (1965)	19	(19)
The Cariboo Horses	19	(1)
Song of the Impermanent Husband	20	(3)
Necropsy of Love	23	(1)
Hockey Players	23	(3)
Home-Made Beer	26	(1)
One Rural Winter	27	(3)
Winter at Roblin Lake	30	(1)
Roblin's Mills	30	(2)
The Country North of Belleville	32	(2)
Fidel Castro in Revolutionary Square	34	(2)
Transient	36	(2)
North of Summer (1967)	38	(14)
Trees at the Arctic Circle	38	(2)
Arctic Rhododendrons	40	(1)
Still Life in a Tent	41	(4)
When I Sat Down to Play the Piano	45	(2)
What Do the Birds Think?	47	(2)
The Country of the Young	49	(2)
Dead Seal	51	(1)
Wild Grape Wine (1968)	52	(24)
The Winemaker's Beat-Etude	52	(2)
Hombre	54	(3)
Watching Trains	57	(2)
Dark Landscape	59	(2)
The Drunk Tank	61	(2)
Sergeant Jackson	63	(2)
Roblin's Mills (2)	65	(2)
About Being a Member of Our Armed Forces	67	(1)
Lament for the Dorsets	68	(2)
Wilderness Gothic	70	(1)
The Runners	71	(3)
Over the Hills in the Rain, My Dear	74	(1)
Detail	75	(1)
Love in a Burning Building (1970)	76	(2)
Married Man's Song	76	(2)
Sex and Death (1973)	78	(7)
Dead March for Sergeant MacLeod	78	(1)
The Horseman of Agawa	79	(2)
The Beavers of Renfrew	81	(3)
For Robert Kennedy	84	(1)
Sundance at Dusk (1976)	85	(7)
The Hunting Camp	85	(3)
Pre-School	88	(1)
Alive or Not	89	(2)
Inside the Mill	91	(1)
A Handful of Earth (1977)	92	(5)
The Death Mask	92	(1)
A Handful of Earth	93	(2)
Prince Edward County	95	(2)
The Stone Bird (1981)	97	(13)
Journey to the Sea	97	(1)
May 23, 1980	98	(2)
Red Fox on Highway 500	100	(3)
Shot Glass Made from a Bull's Horn	103	(1)
Bestiary	104	(2)
In the Garden	106	(1)
Moonspell	107	(1)
Birdwatching at the Equator	108	(2)
Piling Blood (1984)	110	(14)
Piling Blood	110	(2)
Gondwanaland	112	(3)
In the Beginning was the Word	115	(2)
Adam and No Eve	117	(1)
In the Early Cretaceous	118	(3)
Museum Piece	121	(1)
Voltaire	122	(2)
Collected Poems (1986)	124	(4)
Elegy for a Grandfather	124	(3)
The Smell of Rotten Eggs	127	(1)
The Woman on the Shore (1990)	128	(10)
The Prison Lines at Leningrad	128	(1)
Quetzal Birds	129	(1)
The Others	130	(2)
In the Desert	132	(2)
On the Flood Plain	134	(2)
Seasons	136	(2)
Naked with Summer in Your Mouth (1994)	138	(5)
Glacier Spell	138	(1)
Procne into Robin	139	(1)
On Being Human	140	(3)
Afterword	143

Excerpts

TRANSIENT

Riding the boxcars out of Winnipeg in a
morning after rain so close to
the violent sway of fields it's
like running and running
naked with summer in your mouth and
the guy behind you grunts and says
"Got a smoke?"

Being a boy scarcely a moment and you
hear the rumbling iron roadbed singing
under the wheels at night and a door jerking open
mile after dusty mile riding into Regina with
the dust storm crowding behind you and
a guy you hardly even spoke to
nudges your shoulder chummily and says
"Got a smoke?"

Riding into the Crow's Nest mountains with
your first beard itching and a
hundred hungry guys fanning out thru
the shabby whistlestops for handouts and
not even a sandwich for two hundred miles
only the high mountains and knowing
what it's like to be not quite a child any
more and listening to the tough men
talk of women and talk of the way things are
in 1937

Riding down in the spit-grey sea-level morning
thru dockyard streets and dingy dowager houses
with ocean a jump away and the sky beneath you
in puddles on Water Street and an old Indian woman
pushing her yawning scratching daughter
onto a balcony to yell at the boy-man passing
"Want some fun? - come on up" - and the girl just
come from riding the shrieking bedspring bronco
all the up and down night to a hitchpost morning
full of mother and dirt and lice and
hardly the place for a princess
of the Coast Salish
(My dove my little one
tonight there will be wine and drunken suitors
from the logging camps to pin you down
in the outlying lands of sleep
where all roads lead back to the home-village
and water may be walked on)

Stand in the swaying boxcar doorway
moving east away from the sunset and
after a while the eyes digest a country and
the belly perceives a mapmaker's vision
in dust and dirt on the face and hands here
its smell drawn deep thru the nostrils down
to the lungs and spurts thru blood stream
campaigns in the lower intestine
and chants love songs to the kidneys

After a while there is no arrival and
no departure possible any more
you are where you were always going
and the shape of home is under your fingernails
the borders of yourself grown into certainty
the identity of forests that were always nameless
the selfhood of rivers that are changing always
the nationality of riding freight trains thru the depression
over long green plains and high mountain country
with the best and worst of a love that's not to be spoken
and a guy right behind you says then
"Got a smoke?"

You give him one and stand in the boxcar doorway
or looking out the window of a Montreal apartment
or running the machines in a Vancouver factory
you stand there growing older


NECROPSY OF LOVE

If it came about you died
it might be said I loved you:
love is an absolute as death is,
and neither bears false witness to the other --
But you remain alive.

No, I do not love you
hate the word,
that private tyranny inside a public sound,
your freedom's yours and not my own:
but hold my separate madness like a sword,
and plunge it in your body all night long.

If death shall strip our bones of all but bones,
then here's the flesh and flesh that's drunken-sweet
as wine cups in deceptive lunar light:
reach up your hand and turn the moonlight off,
and maybe it was never there at all,
so never promise anything to me:
but reach across the darkness with your hand,
reach across the distance of tonight,
and touch the moving moment once again
before you fall asleep --

---

Excerpted from Rooms for Rent in the Outer Planets: Selected Poems 1962-1996 by Al Purdy
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.