Piling Blood

by Al Purdy

Book by Purdy, Al

Genres: Poetry

144 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1984

About the author

Alfred Wellington Purdy was one of the most popular and important Canadian poets of the 20th century. Purdy's writing career spanned more than fifty years. His works include over thirty books of poetry; a novel; two volumes of memoirs and four books of correspondence. He has been called the nation's "unofficial poet laureate".

Born in Wooler, Ontario Purdy went to Albert College in Belleville, Ontario, and Trenton Collegiate Institute in Trenton, Ontario. He dropped out of school at 17 and rode the rails west to Vancouver. He served in the Royal Canadian Air Force during World War II. Following the war, he worked in various jobs until the 1960s, when he was finally able to support himself as a writer, editor and poet.

Honours and awards Purdy received include the Order of Canada (O.C.) in 1982, the Order of Ontario in 1987, and the Governor General's Award, in 1965 for his collection The Cariboo Horses, and again in 1986 for The Collected Poems of Al Purdy. The League of Canadian Poets gave Purdy the Voice of the Land Award, a special award created by the League to honour his unique contribution to Canada.

Al Purdy died in North Saanich, B.C., on April 21, 2000. His final collection of poetry, Beyond Remembering: The Collected Poems of Al Purdy, was released posthumously in the fall of 2000.

On May 20, 2008, a large bronze statue of Purdy was unveiled in Queen's Park in downtown Toronto.

Reviews

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reading lines like "you looked like / you'd been scalped / by a tribe of / particularly unfriendly / Indians" ("Piling Blood", pg. 13-14) or poems like "On the Intelligence of Woman" (a poem that may appear flattering on the surface, but reinforces outdated ideas about gender roles) reminds me how much has changed in the three decades since this collection was published. At the same time, it reminds me how much has (regrettably) stayed the same...

It was powdered blood
in heavy brown paper bags
supposed to be strong enough
to prevent the stuff from escaping
but didn't

We piled it ten feet high
right to the shed roof
working at Arrow Transfer
on Granville Island
The bags weighed 75 pounds
and you had to stand on two
of the bags to pile the top rows
I was six feet three inches
and needed all of it

I forgot to say
the blood was cattle blood
horses sheep and cows
to be used for fertilizer
the foreman said

It was a matter of some delicacy
to plop the bags down softly
as if you were piling dynamite
if you weren't gentle
the stuff would belly out
from bags in brown clouds
settle on your sweating face
cover hands and arms
enter ears and nose
seep inside pants and shirt
reverting back to liquid blood
and you looked like
you'd been scalped
by a tribe of
particularly unfriendly
Indians and forgot to die

We piled glass as well
it came in wooden crates
two of us hoicking them
off trucks into warehouses
every crate
weighing 200 pounds
By late afternoon
my muscles would twitch and throb
in a death-like rhythm
from hundreds of bags of blood
and hundred of crates of glass

Then at Burns' slaughterhouse
on East Hastings Street
I got a job part time
shouldering sides of frozen beef
hoisting it from steel hooks
staggering to and from
the refrigerated trucks
and eerie freezing rooms
with breath a white vapour
among the dangling corpses
and the sound of bawling animals
screeched down from an upper floor
with their throats cut
and blood gurgling into special drains
for later retrieval

And the blood smell clung to me
clung to clothes and body
sickly and sweet
and I heard the screams
of dying cattle
and I wrote no poems
there were no poems
to exclude the screams
which boarded the streetcar
and travelled with me
till I reached home
turned on the record player
and faintly
in the last century
heard Beethoven weeping

- Piling Blood, pg. 13-15

* * *

She can figure out exactly
who the television villain is
unravelling complexities of melodrama
with a kind of female trigonometry
Now that's trivial
as also the ability to unravel
various subterranean human motives may be
(Whereas I act by impatient instinct
which has to do with nuance and behaviour
the way past actions have marked a face
as well as who gains what for which)
She arrives quickly at a problem's heart
touches a spot some delicate place
physical or abstract in cerebral
hyperspace and the thing plainly explodes
I regard this as quite miraculous
as also the gyrocompass in her head
which places the universe in relation
to our bargain basement box spring
Listening for it sometimes when she's asleep
I hear a little whirring sound
that might be just breathing the normal noise
an uncommon person makes not a deployment
of enormous forces electron and proton etc.
or adjustment of Archimedes' lever
for a ritual burning of the breakfast toast
As for deity she regards anyone
more godlike than me as male chauvinist
Yes I know it all sounds trivial
but to be lost somewhere in the Mexican desert
or atop buttes and hoodoos in Alberta badlands
where everything is so different it's the same
and have her say casually "This way dear"
and be so unvariably right it's unarguable
which I invariably do just to keep in practice
- now that's mysterious
She remembers anything relevant to money
has directional antennae for the stuff
in city streets or stores with bargains
she bought two years ago late August
and how it rained that day at three o'clock
Curiously she can't remember last week last month
last year and very little of her childhood
which she claims is blocked out because unpleasant
Whereas m own memory ranges the entire gamut
of everything I've experienced or can conceive
treading gingerly among bone artifacts
of shame and pride in the cerebral cortex
and limbic brain from bad poems committed
to the occasionally metric universe
and sometimes lost in the Mexican desert
I reach out my hand to her -

- On the Intelligence of Women, pg. 56-57

Here's a poem I didn't hate...

In a depressed blue mood
the day rain-grey
sky nearly weeping
then seeing masses of rhododendrons
a scarlet jubilee in the blood
the flowers half in startled air
and half their petals fallen
- even the ground is cheered up.

- Victoria, B.C., pg. 91