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374 LETTERS IN CANADA 1995 Frye's religious thoughtis an area where discussion is often unnecessarily vague. Clara Thomas's essay is thus a particularly useful piece of intellectual history, and critics who write on Frye would do well to remind themselves that, in Helen Vendler's phrase, he had a 'thoroughly Protestant ' imagination. This remark would have been no surprise to George Grant, who was a genuine example of a Tory radical and whose incisive review of The Great Code (in the Globe and Mail, 27 February 1982) makes clear that Protestantism is but one aspect of Christianity, and that Frye's reading of Western culture and the role of the Bible in it was always from the point of view of the liberal Protestant. As Frye mentions in the PolemicalIntroduction to the Anatomy, and as he told David Cayleyin 1989, he wrote the Anatomy against a background of what he considered determinist criticism, which included neo-Thomism on the right and Marxism on the left. It would be interesting to explore further the intellectual history implied by this remark. Too often literary critics either ignore Christianity altogether with a kind of post-enlightenment tact, or they assume that Christianity is a monolithic ideology. Frye's Christianity was of a relatively unorthodox nature, but with deep roots in a tra,dition which Frye, in opposition to T.S. Eliot, described in Fables ofIdentity as 'Romantic, revolutionary , and Protestant.' The Legacy ofNorthrop Frye is an invaluable book, and will undoubtedly inspire much future scholarly investigation andcritical argument. Itshould be placed alongside A.C. Hamilton's Northrop Frye: AnatomyofHis Criticism and John Ayre's biography as essential reading for any serious student of Frye's work. (J. RUSSELL PERKIN) Sam Solecki, editor. Starting from Ameliasburgh: The CoIIected Prose ofAl Purdy Harbour Publishing. 400. $39.95 'Purdy is mythic. Poet-genius he may be, but as Al Purdy, Myth, he embodies a powerful narrative. ~is is a narrative of attachment, ofconnectedness . We can see it writ large in the travel pieces and literary reviews that 'editor Sam Solecki has brought together in Starting from Ameliasburgh: The Collected Prose ofAi Purdy. As these essays and reviews make Clear, Purdy takes his function seriously. From the creation myth of his days in the Depression 'riding the freight trains west' out of 'the green country of childhood' to the stories of quests with his wife, Eurithe, through the ghost towns of British Columbia, or in search of the lost Vikings and Beothuks of Newfoundland, Purdy's prose mythologizes a birth of the imagination - a birth that takes place around 1960 when Purdy was forty-two, and moved with his wife to Ameliasburgh, Ontario to 'start out' again - pioneers, makers of land, and rock-busters of poetry. There, on the earth of Prince Edward COWlty, as in the essays themselves, Purdy gives voice to that HUMANITIES 375 enduring desire to CDrmectwith something authentic, some core experience that has for Purdy deeply personat political, and poetic implications. In one form Purdy's narrative articulates a myth of 'reaY men - men in a hardscrabble landscape, men who travelled the rails ill the grim 19305, men who type poems 'with two fingers on [a] manually-operated Olympia typewriter.' These men are there, of course, in poems such as 'The Cariboo Horses' and 'Lament for the Dorsets' and in a handful of essays collected here about poets, like Charles Bukowski and Dylan Thomas, and about cougar hunters, ranchers, fishermen, and George Woodcock, that 'protean and ... magnificent' jack of all trades. These men seem to operate as touchstones in a world that can slip away into artsy irrelevance. Indeed one suspects that for Purdy poetry and prose must always taste of the salt of the earth and the grease of the machine. Otherwise, writing can be a mere 'Iiterary game to anyone who has to live in the world of now, go to work on a streetcar, say, and eat jam sandwiches for lunch in a quiet factory comer away from the machines.' Whenhe writes of poetry you can be certain he'll connect it somehow to that factory corner. Sometimes the desire to assert an authentic connection leads him to...

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