\s mYevtew KALEIDOSCOPE - University of British Columbia
\s mYevtew KALEIDOSCOPE - University of British Columbia
\s mYevtew KALEIDOSCOPE - University of British Columbia
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BOOKS IN REVIEWempathy towards suffering beings thatshapes other poems in this book, like thesemi-comic narratives <strong>of</strong> Purdy's encounterswith archaic species surviving in theGalapagos, and his more elegiac meditationson exploring the fossils <strong>of</strong> the UpperCretaceous period (Xenophanes also wasfascinated by fossils) and moving amongthe remains <strong>of</strong> earth's largest animals, thedinosaurs. In a poem like "Lost in theBadlands," there is an almost shamanicsense <strong>of</strong> shedding human identity andmerging into the great common past <strong>of</strong>all animals, <strong>of</strong> mingling one's very boneswith them :No wind or sound <strong>of</strong> voicesonly this non-silencea mirage <strong>of</strong> screaming soundor an illusion <strong>of</strong> 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 poems<strong>of</strong> henpecked husband or ageing cautiouslecher; the historic resonstructions <strong>of</strong> theLoyalist past. And they are here again,in new forms. So are the autobiographicalpieces, which in Piling Blood touchon every period <strong>of</strong> Purdy's life from boyhoodto the present, pondering the nature<strong>of</strong> memory, the way self as well asbody changes, and treating the lives <strong>of</strong>losers, 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 <strong>of</strong>the distant orchards and gardens <strong>of</strong>childhood whom wartime experiencesseemed to destroy :I insist there was something, a thing <strong>of</strong>value.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 <strong>of</strong>is 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 <strong>of</strong> 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 <strong>of</strong>these 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 <strong>of</strong> these poems is thelast in Piling Blood, "In the Early Cretaceous,"where Purdy imagines the firstappearance <strong>of</strong> flowers in the age <strong>of</strong> thedinosaurs and sees in it the splendour <strong>of</strong>unrecorded history, the great sweep <strong>of</strong>time so vast that it becomes incomprehensiblein its linking <strong>of</strong> 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 <strong>of</strong> a single roseand behind that one roseare the ancestors <strong>of</strong> all rosesand all flowers and all the springtimesfor a hundred million years<strong>of</strong> summer and for a moment194