\s mYevtew KALEIDOSCOPE - University of British Columbia

BOOKS IN REVIEWHe wasn't Homer, he wasn't anybodyfamous ;he sang of the people next door;his language was their language; he diedin battle(with a brand new shield). Living washonourenough for him, with death on every hand.Archilochus the soldier, he was us.Three thousand years? I can still hearthat commonsense song of the shield :a loser who managed to be victorious,his name is a champagne cry in my blood.There is no reason to wonder atPurdy's inclination to identify withArchilochus, one of the great originativetalents of antiquity and, in his free useof the Ionic vernacular, a predecessor ofPurdy's own development of a poetrybased on the Canadian vernacular."Commonsense" is the basis for the workof both poets, but only the basis; theyboth fly far from that launching pad.And the stance of the "loser who managedto be victorious"; is not that thesame as Purdy takes up with such effectin the triptych, "Machines," about hisworking in a mattress factory?You could never winthe best to hope forwas not to loseand $1.50 an hour.So we witness Purdy, despite his vastand curious autodidactic erudition, singingof the lives of ordinary people anddoing it in their language; and that ofcourse is one side of him, the ordinaryman who resists all suggestions of beingextraordinary. But what makes him infact extraordinary is not his stance,which many a dull ranting "poet of thepeople" has taken, from Hugh McDiarmiddownward, but his ability to use it,as the real artist can always use mythsand modes of any kind, to produce poetrywhose technical skills equal his philosophicvision.This is perhaps an odd comparisonthat will annoy many purists in Englishliterary studies; I often see Purdy as akind of Wordsworth achevé — a Wordsworthas he would have liked to havebeen rather than as he was. For Purdyreally does "adopt the very language ofmen," as Wordsworth merely aspired todo, and he succeeds because he retainsthe vitality of that language without reducingit to the dullness of Wordsworth'smetrically arranged prose. Purdy oftensings, and sometimes he argues out hisphilosophies of existence with comic irreverencein the hearing of his readers,but he is never prosaic, even metrically,and a good case can be presented forregarding him as our most notable philosopherpoet in a literature whose versifiers,from Sparshott to Layton, are not backwardin presenting philosophic attitudesthat range all the way from St. Ambroseto Friedrich Nietzsche. What makesPurdy the most interesting is that (a) heis the most steadily and consistently developingpoetic craftsman (with whatfelicity he used the Chaucerian tag totitle his first mature book, The crafte solong to lerne —- and never ceased learning!),and (b) he is his own philosopher,and in that aspect more like the archaicGreek poet Xenophanes, who defied theancient gods to fashion his own worldview, than he is like most of his owncontemporaries.For Purdy goes far beyond the poemsabout underpaid work in mattress factories,or about literally piling blood(sacks of it dried), or about the experiencesworking in the abbatoir which hecannot leave behind him :there were no poemsto exclude the screamswhich boarded the streetcarand travelled with metill I reached hometurned on the record playerand faintlyin the last centuryheard Beethoven weeping.Obviously such experiences link with