This is a book with a mission. On one level it is a celebration of the
great Canadian poet Al Purdy by eminent writers who were his
contemporaries. It is also part of a campaign to preserve the place that
was the centre of Purdy's writing universe--his home, a lakeside A-frame
cottage in Ameliasburgh, Ontario, where he and his wife Eurithe lived
for 43 years. The cottage was one of the most important crossroads on
Canada's literary map, a kind of tribal mustering place for notable
Canadian writers from the 1950s to the 1990s including Margaret
Laurence, Milton Acorn, Patrick Lane, Tom Marshall, Scott Symons, R. G.
Everson, H. R. Percy, Lynn Crosbie, Michael Holmes, Maggie Helwig and a
host of others. This book collects anecdotes, reminiscences, and poems
by a roll call of Canadian writers about memorable days and nights spent
at the A-frame, along with a selection of Purdy's own writing showing
the depth of his feeling for the place where he put down his roots.
Eurithe Purdy says Al was always his most productive at the A-frame.
"Despite the caviar receptions and gold accolades, he always returned to
this jury-rigged little A-frame tacked to a low-slung, leaning bungalow.
The whole edifice, he observed, 'bent a little in the wind and dreamt of
the trees it came from.' Here, he could observe all his poetry's
recurring themes: love, death, ego, 'the glories of copulation.'" All
profits from The Al Purdy A-Frame Anthology will go towards preserving
the Purdy home as a retreat for future generations of Canadian writers.
