The Last Canadian Poet: An Essay on Al Purdy by Sam Solecki (review)

954 Reviews to be the actual presentations transcribed rather than refined for publication. While it would have been impossible, of course, to include every major writer,especially in a collection stemming from a symposium, it is significant that Atwood is mentioned as a strong short-story writer only in the introduction, and her internationally recog? nized work is never examined. One could argue that this is because the series aims to evaluate neglected authors, but Margaret Laurence, Alice Munro, Sheila Watson, Morley Callaghan, Timothy Findley, and Alistair MacLeod are all explored, and they are hardly neglected writers. The second collection is uneven in some respects, but useful none the less, and would provide a helpful critical companion for an undergraduate course in Canadian fiction. Taken together, the two texts offerinterestingand compelling critical analyses of Canadian literature. A minor quibble with the layout of each of the volumes is that individual paragraphs are both indented and also separated by a line-space, which is visually distracting. Additionally, in Bolder Flights individual essays have stylistic inconsistencies (for example, the titles oflong poems are sometimes italicized, sometimes placed in quotation marks). These are, however, trifling complaints. A more serious one is that neither of these books is likely to be easily purchased in the UK, a fact that Canadian literary specialists will ruefully recognize. University of Central Lancashire Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson The Last Canadian Poet: An Essay on Al Purdy. By Sam Solecki. Toronto, Buffalo, New York, and London: University of Toronto Press. 2000. xix + 316 pp. $50; ?32. Except for its awkward title, Sam Solecki's The Last Canadian Poet is an engaging study of a major and a widely respected Canadian poet who died in early spring 2000. The book's central argument appears to draw much of its energy fromwhat the author has described as Purdy's ambiguous status in the context of Canadian literary culture. On the one hand, says Solecki, Purdy has been acknowledged 'as probably the pre-eminent poet of our literature'. Yet, on the other, he has shared the destiny of a number of other canonized poets (E. J.Pratt, A. J.M. Smith, P. K. Page, and Irving Layton) whose work has been 'curiously ignored in recent years' (p. ix) by younger critics and academics. To help the reader make sense of this paradoxical situation, Solecki offershis views in two well-defined parts which constitute the main body of the book, the contextual and the explicative. The first part, 'Poetry, Nation, and the Last Canadian Poet', builds a meticulously researched and eloquently presented cultural and critical context for situating Purdy's work. With professional ease and scholarly acumen, Solecki traverses the literary production of Canada's firstcentury, emphasizing one of its authors' most common features, the 'dream of a national literature [that] was inextricable from the dream of a nation' (p. 14). The most intriguing aspect in this section is, however, Solecki's explicitly conservative positioning, his defence of the continuity of a Cana? dian tradition, the very tradition that he finds at the heart of Purdy's best poetry. Unabashedly, Solecki calls into question the validity of recent critical practice, its 'soft or postmodern multicultural attitude' (p. 24), that considers tradition, if not suspect, irrelevant. For Solecki and for Solecki's Purdy, there cannot be a cultural memory and an art that is its mirror without antecedents: tradition in addition to being created is also inherited. The enquiry into the nature of contemporary Canadian criticism, though timely and certainly called for,tends to get too entangled in its own polemical rhetoric. Obviously not all the writing that has been privileged by the postmodern or postcolonial MLR, 97.4, 2002 955 critics is second-rate, as Solecki would have us believe. Certainly not all of it had 'politicized culture to make it do the work of identity politics' (p. 24). Yet asking the question why contemporary Canadian critics have so frequently ignored the classics from previous generations is important, a sort of rescue waking call. Solecki is absolutely right when he insists that a tradition cannot be devalued, glossed over, simply because it was created by our ancestors who operated within a differentideological framework. A...

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