[In Search of Owen Roblin emerges] at a significant point in [Purdy's career and is] an epitome, a summing-up, of [his] thematic and rhetorical concerns…. Purdy's "country north of Belleville" is a country of the mind, Purdy's home as distinct from his environment, an emotionally and psychologically secure point in space and time from which to articulate and to attempt to define one's unique and generic being…. Purdy's persona is … in search of links with his ancestors in order to realize his place in the continuity of human life…. Purdy the poet's implicit search for an adequate language in the poem is a manifestation of the search for a psychic place that will yield meaning. Purdy long ago lapsed into what he calls the "original / sin of discursiveness," which was in my view actually a felix culpa, but In Search of Owen Roblin is unequivocally his most discursive poem, revealing his incessant need to talk, to articulate his feelings and attitudes in an effort to come to terms with them and to forestall the disappearance of the moment.

In Search of Owen Roblin is essentially a work about itself, and it crystallizes a theme that permeates all Purdy's work: man's motive for fiction in the root sense of the word (fingere—to make or shape), his need to structure his experiences in order to make sense of them, his need to mythologize the past and to "invent" memories. In a very significant way, we are all poets like Purdy, continuously creating and recreating our experiences, because our ordinary experiences—what we usually call life—in which everything fades immediately into the past, cannot provide a genuine sense of meaning. Fiction, in this fundamental sense, is really our only method of making life fully available, of preserving it as a present reality, and Purdy suggests in this poem and elsewhere that it is the only way in which the past and those who lived in the past continue to exist in the present. This motive for fiction accounts for the sense that a Purdy poem is only a fragment of some larger, incomplete poem that he is always writing and for his preoccupation with the artifacts of lost or disappearing civilizations …, for such artifacts are the result of man's attempt to preserve his experience and to give it human meaning. (p. 47)

This motive for fiction also accounts for the strong sense in Purdy's poems of the poet as a recorder and preserver of experience…. As poet, Purdy speaks for us, articulating our feelings and states of mind and, by so doing, helps us to speak for ourselves. The poet's task is an attempt to "register," to "screen," experience, to measure or fix it—to make it permanent in some way—but the attempt at fixity in Purdy's work is in continual tension with the open-endedness of his poems, which mimetically expresses the ultimate inability to structure permanently any experience, and with the sense of the Purdy poem as a meditative process. Consequently, In Search of Owen Roblin explores, as so many Purdy poems do, the ways in which past and present, fact and fiction, history and myth, constantly penetrate each other, reshaping and reinterpreting each other and, in so doing, reconstituting one's sense of reality.

Purdy is at his most interesting technically in the poem when he assumes the voice or mentality of a character different from his habitual persona, and if he has now completed his exploration of the poetic territory north of Belleville, this mode is certainly a technical area that could be explored further. (pp. 47-8)

A few poems in Purdy's … collection of poems, Sex and Death (which includes Hiroshima Poems, seven meditative poems on the moral-philosophical implications of Hiroshima for man, the last of which, "Remembering Hiroshima," is one of Purdy's most powerful philosophical poems), are in this mode. One of them, "In the Foothills", is the best in the collection. The persona is a primitive hunter who has identified with a prehistoric mammoth in its shrieking death (compare Purdy's identification with Albert, the prehistoric dinosaur, whose tail has been bitten in On the Bearpaw Sea) and who attempts to come to terms with himself and the meaning of the event by carving a mammoth on the stone of a mountain. In the hunter's cathartic need to objectify his feelings and to find meaning in life, a need we all share, Purdy has actually created a myth of the artist.

As in In Search of Owen Roblin, the raison d'être of Sex and Death is the motive for metaphor: the persona in all the poems is seeking understanding and existential realization. It is a collection of poems that reveals Purdy at the peak of his poetic performance. All the dimensions of the Purdy persona that we have come to expect are here, and his talent for energizing the trivial and commonplace, for making us see things that were there all along, has never been more efficacious. Despite the fact that his tonal virtuosity and genius with verbs have never been more evident, Purdy has perfected his poetic mode to the point where no technical device draws attention to itself. Purdy's work has now reached the stage of artless art, and this quality is charged with a rhetorical efficacy that makes the poems infinitely accessible. The sense in the poems here of one perception invariably and smoothly leading to another, emphasized by the sparing use of punctuation, establishes a sense of stylistic and ratiocinative continuity that, in turn, makes us aware of the meditative, explorative quality of the poems.

In Search of Owen Roblin is the fruition of the meditative mode that Purdy has been practicing ever since Poems for All the Annettes…. It is surely Purdy's best poem and his most important one for an understanding of all his work…. (p. 48)