Al Purdy

Photo: Julia Ashberry

Alfred Wellington ‘Al’ Purdy was born 30 December 1918 in Wooler, Ontario and grew up in Trenton. During World War II, he served in the Royal Canadian Air Force and then worked as a labourer until he was able to support himself as a writer. In addition to poetry, Purdy wrote travel articles, book reviews, plays for the CBC, and also edited poetry anthologies. He died on 21 April 2000 of lung cancer in Sidney, British Columbia. On 23 September 2001, the public library in Ameliasburgh, Ontario was renamed the Al Purdy Library to honour the hamlet's famous resident.

Books by Al Purdy

	1944 The Enchanted Echo
	1955 Pressed on Sand
	1956 Emu, Remember!
	1959 The Crafte So Long to Lerne
	1962 The Blur in Between: Poems 1960-61
	1962 Poems for All the Annettes
	1965 The Cariboo Houses
	1967 North of Summer: Poems from Baffin Island
	1968 Wild Grape Wine
	1970 Love in a Burning Building
	1971 The Quest for Ouzo
	1972 Hiroshima Poems
	1972 Selected Poems
	1973 On the Bearpaw Sea
	1973 Sex and Death
	1974 In Search of Owen Roblin
	1976 The Poems of Al Purdy: A New Canadian Library Selection
	1976 Sundance at Dusk
	1977 A Handful of Earth
	1977 At Marsport Drugstore
	1977 Moths in the Iron Curtain
	1977 No Other Country
	1977 No Second Spring
	1978 Being Alive: Poems 1958-1978
	1981 The Stone Bird
	1982 Birdwatching at the Equator: The Galapagos Islands
	1982 Bursting in Song: An Al Purdy Omnibus
	1983 Morning and It's Summer: A Memoir
	1983 The Bukowski/Purdy Letters 1964-1974: A Decade of Dialogue (edited by Seamus Cooney)
	1984 Piling Blood
	1986 The Collected Poems of Al Purdy, 1956-1986
	1987 The George Woodcock/Al Purdy Letters (edited by George Galt)
	1990 A Splinter in the Heart
	1990 The Woman on the Shore
	1992 Cougar Hunter: A Memoir of Roderick Haig-Brown
	1993 Reaching for the Beaufort Sea: An Autobiography
	1993 Margaret Laurence - Al Purdy: A Friendship in Letters (edited by John Lennox)
	1994 Naked With Summer in Your Mouth
	1995 Starting from Ameliasburgh: The Collected Prose of Al Purdy
	1996 Rooms for Rent in the Outer Planets, Selected Poems, 1962-1996
	1996 In Mexico
	1997 To Paris Never Again
	2000 Beyond Remembering: The Collected Poems of Al Purdy
	2004 Yours, Al: The Collected Letters of Al Purdy (edited by Sam Solecki)

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