The Ivory Thought: Essays on Al Purdy

'Buried bones and ornaments and stuff': Purdy's Reliquary Poetics

"Buried bones and ornaments and stuff" Purdy's Reliquary Poetics TIM HEATH N DISCUSSIONS OFAL PURDY'S writing, the terms elegy and elegiac repeatedly emerge, but neither adequately describes Purdy's instinct that the dead, ruins, fragments, stones, fences, bones, "ornaments and stuff" populating his poems concentrate some precious essence that remains hauntingly ineffable ("In Etruscan Tombs/' BR 585). In an effort to identify that essence, Dennis Lee reaches for religious and theological language to say that Purdy's poems frequently encode the "experience of the mysterium tremendum—the encounter with holy otherness" (383). As Lee elaborates, for Purdy "tremendum is always mediated through things of the world" (383). Lee's observation not only puts the sacred and profane or the spiritual and material in apposition— an arrangement that might be considered startling in light of the dominant constructions of Purdy's canon and persona—but it also calls for some means of understanding this element of Purdy's work.1 Adding to i. Mark Silverberg's'The Can(adi)onization ofAl Purdy" examinesboth Purdy's canonization and the constructionof his persona. 191 I 192 I TIM HEATH what Lee says, Fraser Sutherland, in a letter to Purdy of 25August 1995, writes that Purdy's "poems are saturated with religious belief, inasmuch as they are perpetually involved in the process of transforming matter into spirit (transcendence), and spirit into matter (immanence)" (YA 508). Both Lee and Sutherland identify an insistent pattern in Purdy's poetry and, thus, both hint at the need for something more than a mere acknowledgement of a religious dimension or theme in Purdy's work. Neither writer, however, suggests that Purdy commits to some genre called the religious poem, but Lee's "mediated" and Sutherland's "transforming" indicate that a technique and a purpose govern Purdy's collocationof the spiritual and material.Apoetics, then, best describes this quality of his writing, and indicates why I want to advance the term reliquary poetics to describe and understand the relationship Purdy so often creates between the living, the dead, and an object—for example, the reader, the carver, and the ivory swan of "Lament for the Dorsets." Although a reliquary poetics might smackof religious scholasticism, particularly because reliquaries belong especially to the mediaeval Christian church, reliquaries also belong to Hinduism, Buddhism, ancient Greece, and any culture that cherishes defunct objects and customs. In this sense, relics and reliquaries assert the possibility that a seemingly worthless object possesses special value, so much so that the very idea of precious refuse troubles such binaries as worthless/invaluable, sacred/profane, spiritual/material, and immanent/transcendent. Sutherland's letter to Purdy appears to uphold this latter distinction, but its key phrase—"the process of transforming matter into spirit. .. and spirit into matter"—suggests that the immanent and transcendent reciprocate in Purdy's poetry (YA 508). Lee's diction in his afterword to The Collected Poems also searches for terms to describe the unity of things in Purdy's work: "commingle," "simultaneous," "both lost and home," "meeting holy otherness in the daily world" testify to Lee's efforts at naming Purdy's poetic. In something of a heuristic tour de force, Lee eventually says that Purdy is "held by the intuition of an eternal now.Everything that has ever meant itself, ever been at all, seems still to live undiminished in that dimension. Hence everything is simultaneous with everything else" (384). The totalizing force of these words—"eternal . . . Everything . . . ever . . . all ... still to live"— explains why a reliquary poetics best describes what can only be called a species of philosophical monism at work in Purdy's writing. I am not suggesting that Purdy formally held to the thought of,say, Parmenides, Christian Wolff, or Baruch Spinoza, but the consistent high valuation Purdy gives to that which is discarded and obsolete receivesaccurate "Buried bones and ornaments and stuff" 193 description under the heading of monism becauseno other concept so helpfully identifies the way that many of his poems conceive of things as a oneness or unity, with such force that God and the universe are aspects of this single substance. Put another way, nothing is worthless to Purdy, but nothing is sacred either, at least in a conventional, dualistic sense. In this way, a parallel can be found between Robinson Jeffers and Purdy insofar as both poets occupy metaphysical positions, but Jeffers is programmatic where Purdy remains suggestive and allusive. Purdy will...