housebroken," Dennis Lee wrote in a now-classic essay on [Al] Purdy's place in Canadian literature. "And if we approach even a classic Purdy poem too reverently, expecting a rarefied masterpiece, it is likely to light a cigar, tell a bad joke and leave halfway through the conversation."But what pulls people back to Purdy today is what now seems least fashionable about his poetry: its overt search for a distinctly Canadian language and poetics, what Lee called "a muscular, roomy, and persuasive vision of coherence centred in our own here and now"--something, he added, that did not exist before Purdy.
from The Globe and Mail: Why Canada's A-list wants to save Al Purdy's A-Frame
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