Much-loved, cantankerous, and brilliant, Al Purdy galloped across the Canadian literary landscape for decades, grandly embodying the self-taught and hard-living image of the 1960s and '70s poet. The More Easily Kept Illusions: The Poetry of Al Purdy is a selection of thirty-five poems that includes some of his best-loved and unearths lost and ignored treasures.

Robert Budde introduces the collection with an overview of Purdy's tumultuous life of letters, his legendary personality, his outrageous antics, his peers, his influences, and the history of his publishing career. Reorganizing Purdy's body of work, this collection also re-interprets the chronological and thematic development of his writing. Choosing poems for a book like this is necessarily an act of literary criticism and Budde takes care to balance the various critical attentions that have structured the historical responses to Purdy's work. The selected poems will mix lesser-known gems with Purdy's greatest hits. Teachers, poetry-lovers, students, and writers will rediscover Purdy's unique voice. Those who are new to his work will get a full and rich sense of the man some have called the last Canadian poet.

Also includes an Afterword by Russell Morton Brown.

Al Purdy's down-to-earth voice populates thirty-three books, including The Cariboo Horses (1965), North of Summer (1967), Sex & Death (1973), and Piling Blood (1984). The two major collections of his work are The Collected Poems of Al Purdy (1986) and Beyond Remembering: The Collected Poems of Al Purdy (2000). Purdy died in Sidney, BC, on April 21, 2000.

Table of Contents for
The More Easily Kept Illusions: The Poetry of Al Purdy, selected with an introduction by Robert Budde

Foreword | Neil Besner

Biographical Note

Introduction | Robert Budde

Mind Process re a Faucet

Remains of an Indian Village

Winter Walking

Hockey Players

Home-Made Beer

Eskimo Graveyard

Trees at the Arctic Circle

Tent Rings

When I Sat Down to Play the Piano

At the Quinte Hotel

Love at Roblin Lake

Interruption

Wilderness Gothic

Lament for the Dorsets

Joint Account

Depression in Namu, BC

Eastbound from Vancouver

The Horseman of Agawa

Flat Tire in the Desert

Inside the Mill

Deprivations

Alive or Not

Rodeo

On Realizing He Has Written Some Bad Poems

After Rain

The Nurselog

A Typical Day in Winnipeg

In the Early Cretaceous

Purely Internal Music

Orchestra

Red Leaves

Orchestra

Earle Birney in Hospital

Untitled

For Her in Sunlight

Afterword: As the dream holds the real | Russell Morton Brown

Acknowledgements