\s mYevtew KALEIDOSCOPE - University of British Columbia

BOOKS IN REVIEWempathy towards suffering beings thatshapes other poems in this book, like thesemi-comic narratives of Purdy's encounterswith archaic species surviving in theGalapagos, and his more elegiac meditationson exploring the fossils of the UpperCretaceous period (Xenophanes also wasfascinated by fossils) and moving amongthe remains of earth's largest animals, thedinosaurs. In a poem like "Lost in theBadlands," there is an almost shamanicsense of shedding human identity andmerging into the great common past ofall animals, of mingling one's very boneswith them :No wind or sound of voicesonly this non-silencea mirage of screaming soundor an illusion of silenceas if every animal that ever livedand died was strugglingtrying to get your attentionand all the calcium carbonatein your bones shufflingits components uneasily.There are fairly constant componentsin all Purdy volumes: the comic poemsof henpecked husband or ageing cautiouslecher; the historic resonstructions of theLoyalist past. And they are here again,in new forms. So are the autobiographicalpieces, which in Piling Blood touchon every period of Purdy's life from boyhoodto the present, pondering the natureof memory, the way self as well asbody changes, and treating the lives oflosers, who seem to have inhabitedPurdy's life in exceptional numbers, witha deeper compassion, more honest becausemore bewildered, than in the past.There is one especially moving poem,"My Cousin Don," about a companion ofthe distant orchards and gardens ofchildhood whom wartime experiencesseemed to destroy :I insist there was something, a thing ofvalue.It survived when death came callingfor my friend on an Italian battlefield :not noble, not heroic, not beautiful —It escapes my hammering mind,eludes any deliberate seeking,and all I can think ofis apples apples apples . . .And another — "How it feels to be old"— is obliquely about old men but overtlyabout old dogs, a boy's dog shot for stealingchickens, another who the day beforedying went to the water and tried toswim away :At the hour of departurethere seems to me littledifference between speciesand that's a good a wayto leave as any(Dylan notwithstanding) :swim straight outwardtowards a distant shorewith the dog star overheadand music on the watersBut for me the most memorable ofthese poems are those in which the philosophicruminations are mingled with alyrical vision and the elegiac mood issuddenly lightened with a joy in living.Perhaps the best of these poems is thelast in Piling Blood, "In the Early Cretaceous,"where Purdy imagines the firstappearance of flowers in the age of thedinosaurs and sees in it the splendour ofunrecorded history, the great sweep oftime so vast that it becomes incomprehensiblein its linking of all the world'sprocesses in vast, inevitable and unrememberablesequence.But no one will ever knowwhat it was likethat first time on primordial earthwhen bees went mad with pollen feverand seeds flew away from homeon little drifting white parachuteswithout a word to their parents— no one can ever knoweven when someone is giventhe gift of a single roseand behind that one roseare the ancestors of all rosesand all flowers and all the springtimesfor a hundred million yearsof summer and for a moment194