There's an elemental lesson about Al Purdy's poetry to be learned by paging through the files of certain literary magazines of the past twenty-five years or so. In the earliest days of his career, Purdy gave his name, in all its Loyalist splendour, as Alfred Wellington Purdy. But he quickly condensed this to Alfred W. Purdy. Then came a long period of uncertainty and experiment when, with equal ease, he answered in print to both Alfred W. and A. W. Purdy. It's only been in the 1970s that his by-line has become completely stable in its least formal incarnation, just plain Al.

But that's not all. Concurrent with what otherwise would seem this simple exercise in marketing, another and more important form of ecdysis was taking place. As Purdy was reducing his name to its simplest and most appropriate form, he was undertaking to do the same to his poetry, freeing himself of some badly chosen early influences, a lot of unnatural speech, and various other foreign matter. To go back today and reread him, watching the reductive process by which he finds his distinctive style and rightful voice, is to experience a quiet, cumulative excitement. (p. 68)

[Being Alive: Poems 1958–78 is] more than a fitting testament to his work up to now, but it's not just a pause for reflection at the age of sixty. It shows him in his present stride as a craftsman and a poetic personality, continuing the struggle to reach some sort of agreement with history.

A concern with how to find roots in an uprooted past, and what to do with them, seems to have always been central to many Canadian poets, and not simply to the obvious ones. With Purdy the question is nothing short of a daily obsession. (pp. 68-9)

One of the differences between him and other poets is that, in his case, environment has combined with his marvellous self-acquired education to produce a feeling for folklore. This is apparent in the anthropological turn he takes in many of his poems…. (p. 69)

[It's Purdy's comic] pose that allows [him] to comment on everyday misadventures and non-adventures. But even when writing about marital spats and the like, he's never very far from a serious purpose: married life, in Purdy's poems, is often an unconscious metaphor for the way history accumulates, the way things always go on but never remain the same. When he writes prose, which he does from time to time, Purdy tries using this same persona, but he's never as successful. His grammar is made to look dilapidated and the syntax always seems to have its shirttail hanging out. The problem is not that he lacks style; it's that he loses interest in writing which isn't poetry, which doesn't put his eye and his ear to working in unison.

To think of Purdy as a craftsman has never been very fashionable, but this just shows the folly of conventional wisdom. Many of his longer poems especially, such as "Hombre," his powerful obituary for Che Guevara, are marvellously put together, with jaggedness and mellifluousness played off against each other and repetition cleverly deployed. The result is the prose-like but hypnotic pace that's characteristic of his poems—a rhythm which, along with the particular use he makes of idiomatic language, could be called influential. (pp. 69-70)

If there's one conclusion to be drawn about Purdy from Being Alive it's that he's that rare creature in literary circles, a truly happy man—unmarked by rancour, living a well-considered life, trying basically to make sense of his past and his present. (p. 70)