[There] is no doubt of [Purdy's] deep intuitive grasp of the nature of the land, of the character of its history, though to claim him as purely a Canadian poet would be to do him an immense injustice. But Canada—and Loyalist Ontario in particular—is indeed the heart of his world…. (p. 8)

[The east-west] extremities of the land are the poles between which he suspends his vision of Canada, a vision that interprets geography and history as interpenetrating versions of each other. To further narrow his vision, it is essentially a rural one, which hardly recognizes a city except Vancouver (deurbanized by the penetrating sea), and it is based on the knowledge, which most Canadians are curiously anxious to avoid, that this is, even in human terms, an ancient and not a new land, a land already beginning to decay into maturity. (p. 9)

[What makes Purdy] a real rural poet, as distinct from a country sentimentalist, is his concreteness of view, an awareness of the brilliant surface of the earth as clear as that of an imagist, and yet at the same time a sense of depths and heights, of superreal dimensions, so that common things can suddenly become irradiated and the world swing into ecstasy.

But not too much into ecstasy for the existential relations to continue, and the vision of place to be poised between tradition and change, as in "Wilderness Gothic", one of his most completely successful poems, where he is watching a man across Roblin Lake repairing a church spire, working his way up towards its vanishing point, as if his faith pushed him beyond it. It is one of the poems in which Purdy deftly juxtaposes the different elements of his world, for as the man works at patching the edifice of a dying religion, the life of nature goes on in its old merciless way. (p. 10)

North, like West, is a cardinal direction for Purdy (as South over the border most certainly is not), and it is in some of his Arctic poems that he becomes most purely the poet of place, though even here it is often still the kind of dialogue between the man and his environment with its finned and feathered and flowered inhabitants, which is almost incessant at Roblin Lake, going on in other ways. (p. 11)

[Purdy] is not only wide in thought and subtle in vision, but also extremely versatile as a poetic craftsman who has worked his way through the forms and styles to his present open manner…. It is in the way he can manipulate the long line to create a variety of moods that Purdy has shown his growing power to fit the form exactly to the thought and thing, which is the sign of ultimate poetic craftsmanship. This is not to say that his poems are entirely linear in their overall structure, for often the juxtaposition of jarring or contrasting elements is an essential part of the effect he is seeking, and there are times when he uses the moderately short line very effectively to achieve a cumulative emotive effect…. But he is never one of your gasping, grunting, three-or-four-syllable-a-line men. No discursive, philosophic, historic, didactic poet—and Purdy is all these—ever can be.

Yet for all its didacticism, there is much in Purdy's poetry that has the effortless, gratuitous magic which has been the sign of a good poet in any age: lines like

     We live with death but it's life we die with
     in the blossoming earth where springs the rose …

or the whole of "Necropsy of Love", whose last lines have the kind of hypnotic midnight power of some of Keats or some Decadent poetry …:

     If death shall strip our bones of all but bones,
     then here's the flesh, and flesh that's drunken-sweet
     as wine cups in deceptive lunar light:
     reach up your hand and turn the moonlight off,
     and maybe it was never there at all,
     so never promise anything to me:
     but reach across the darkness with your hand,
     reach across the distance of tonight,
     and touch the moving moment once again
                before you fall asleep …
                                        (pp. 13-14)

[There are] various poetic devices … which, having abandoned rhyme and ordinary metre, Purdy has recourse on the appropriate occasion: … [examples are] the use of alliteration and repetition, the presence at times of regular syllabic patterns, the occasional resort to galloping trochaic rhythms, and, as a matter of rhythm as well as language, a superb colloquial ear….

[Purdy] is also the poet of comedy…. It is comedy that easily runs black, for it is based on a totally realistic sense of what individual man's fate is in a world where grandeur is a feat of the imagination; where man grows old though his lusts stay young; where his actions are contemptible though his thoughts are high; where his attempts to reconcile the animal and the human within him always end in comic absurdity. The decay and death that finally await him Purdy portrays with realistic horror, yet with compassion for the defeated, and with admiration for those who cry out in rage against [their] destiny…. (p. 14)