Al Purdy as poet is person and persona; there is no escaping the earthy cynical unselfconfident egotistical balding paunching middleaged man, deliberately common and secular. He is also by turns sensitive, boisterous, ironical, whimsical, sentimental, and sententious…. Despite the vivacity, the bluster, and the ironic mask, Purdy's essential stance is sentimental and conservative.

Purdy is a personal poet, and his style depends for its effectiveness on an apt use of the speaking voice. He who is speaking is often one of Purdy's three main personae—the common man, the boisterous man, or the sensitive man. The common-man persona is the base persona, the one on which his style stands…. The subjects of Purdy's poetry are common and ostensibly unpretentious—personal experiences, people he has known, domestic scenes. His poetic "place" is not a tower or a grove but a hand-built house out in nowhere. He has debarred himself from the role of "Poet", and we find him on his back under his old Pontiac (horny), grubbing around a ruined house (chased off), defecating near the Pole (savaged by dogs). His poetry when bad is just broken-lined prose, and the faults of his poetry otherwise—triviality, pretention, discursiveness, bathos, bad metaphors—similarly reflect the image of the common man. (p. 242)

The boisterous persona, lecherous, rowdy, drunken, accounts for some of his liveliest poetry (and most of his worst), and provides much of his humour. This persona is a blusterer and a great debunker, given to an amused deprecation of sensitive poets…. Through [the persona of the sensitive man] Purdy reaches some of the finest moments in his poetry; he reaches too "the still centre, / an involvement in silences" ("Winter Walking"), the religious centre of his world…. It is obvious that the boisterous persona does not hold the day, that regret, wistfulness, sensitivity creep back in. The opposition between these two roles represents a conflict basic to Purdy's poetry. The sensitive rather than the tough voice is the one that predominates. (pp. 242-43)

[His sentimentality, evident in poems like "Sculptors,"] this care for the hurt and the flawed, for "the inconsolable / walkers in the storm / cursing at the locked gates of fact" ("Nine Bean-Rows on the Moon"), is the ground of Purdy's stance.

Given the world, a stance such as this is open to defeat, and Purdy, in trying to deal with the world as "that sort of place", reacts against his own idealism and sentimentality…. Purdy cannot escape cynicism and doubt…. The reaction against sentimentality yields some fine and energetic poetry; but it remains a reaction. Whether by cynicism, retreat, or irony, it recognizes the pain of understanding that the world is a cruel place and that man is a flawed and a suffering thing.

The sense of man's impotence is accompanied by a sense of the transitory, of man's continual loss through time…. The sense of the transitory extends from the very personal to the elegiac, a sense of cultural loss closely associated with the individual's situation, found in poems such as "Country North of Belleville". Here, on abandoned farms, once the place of a simple but harsh life, "Old fences drift vaguely among trees" and "a pile of moss-covered stones / gathered for some ghost purpose / has lost meaning under the meaningless sky." (pp. 244-45)

Purdy does not, in lamenting man's state, rail against God. The "blind engineers of the universe" are merely figures of speech; in only a few poems does God appear, and in none of them does he exist…. Although for Purdy God does not exist, there is in his poetry a sensitivity to religious experience, an awareness of transcendence in the encounter with "silence", and a sense of loss and despair in the face of meaninglessness. The sense of this void, together with the care Purdy has for humanity, serve to strengthen a dependence upon the past and upon the continuity of human life. Not only do Purdy's poems continually implicate, appeal to, draw in the past, but they pose a theory of the continuum of history and a metaphysic of the continued existence of individuals. (pp. 246-47)

[A] sense of continuum is the basis of Purdy's humanist view of history. The continuum, history, has about it a certain stasis. Place is constant, time is not. Time does not move 'onward'; rather, it overlays itself, has depth…. It is important for Purdy that every individual retain his value through time; a continuity and a unity of human life results. (pp. 248-49)

It is important for an understanding of Purdy's approach and temper to note that [his] theories of history, time, and continuity of existence, are lodged in the most common experiences and situations. They are rarely elaborate expositions. When they are, they are placed in contexts which serve to de-emphasize the intellectual pretension of the material…. At the same time, he extends his poems through allusion to myth, to historical events, to far places, broadens the scope of the common, shows its full potential significance.

The way in which Purdy deals with social and political matters is consonant with and expressive of his sentimental and conservative stance…. Sometimes Purdy does protest civil injustice, but generally he accepts it as part of experience. He is concerned with the universal human condition and with the personal condition; these concerns are at once too broad and too narrow to yield much protest literature. (p. 250)

I have used the words "sensitive", "sympathetic", "caring", and "sentimental" rather freely in reference to Purdy's stance; I do not mean to intimate that he is a pantywaist, or that he is weak-willed (his poetry seems to fear this interpretation). About most of Purdy's poetry there is a fine vigour, generated not only by the self-protective boisterous voice, but also by the reaction against ideals which the harshness of the world stimulates, by the image of the common man caught in the midst of his (slightly ludicrous) situation, by an agile imagination, by the enormous energy of history which Purdy taps so often, and by a style of poetry rhetorical rather than reflective. The governing sensibility or disposition of Purdy's poetry, however, is humane and sympathetic. The emphasis is on the individual, on the meaning of his life and of his sorrows. The world with which the sensibility is faced is flawed, full of pain; God is apparently absent; meaning is precarious, hard to reach and hold. Sympathy and history are the two strongest sources of value; Purdy exercises and demands the first and creates a metaphysic which ensures the meaningfulness and the accessibility of the second. As history is accessible and provides value, and as the modern world apparently allows less value to the individual even than did past times, the poetry tends to be conservative and elegiac. As "The Country North of Belleville", one of his finest poems, has it, the land where value can best be contacted is also "the country of our defeat", to which we can return only with difficulty. (pp. 252-53)