Should a man's conscience be our touchstone in evaluating his poetry? The old question is pressingly relevant when we read Al Purdy, who on the one hand grieves over nuclear weapons ('The Buddhist Bell', 'Remembering Hiroshima') and poverty ('In the Darkness of Cities'), and on the other hand spends a generous human love on people, places, animals, the dead past, all the minutiae of daily living - yet who expresses his griefs and loves in a language whose claim on us is often raised only through garrulousness or loudness. The tell-it-like-it-is poetry Purdy writes has the obvious virtue of attesting the poet's honesty: Al Purdy's love of Canada, of the combine harvester 'cropping the wide Saskatchewan plain' or a flight of geese 'sweeping to the continental vanishing point', of well-loved locations in Ontario (Roblin Lake, and nearby Ameliasburg, and Belleville) and elsewhere in Canada (Baffin Island, Vancouver, L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, Lake Superior, Prince Edward Island, and so forth), of 'southern counties/with English names', of beavers and cariboo horses, or autumn maples and Arctic rhododendrons - all this richness of love is never in doubt. It is there, palpable on the page, the zest of a man in love with life, with Canada, with women, with poetry, and also with himself. But typically the love and caring in Purdy the man are squandered in the sprawling yawp of Purdy the poet: the love turns out to be only a compendious sentimentality, the caring what Purdy himself calls 'emotional ...