Al Purdy has published more than 30 volumes of poetry, won two GGs, and received the Order of Canada. For decades reviewers have discussed him, both as a Canadian cultural icon and as a literary institution, using the same superlatives. He’s been called everything from “the finest” to “the greatest of our poets.” High praise indeed. The kind often reserved for the éminence grise who is well-respected but past their prime, no longer as sharp or productive. In Al Purdy’s case, however, the story’s different.

As much as he or you or I might hate those adjectives that call him, in effect, the “best,” his poetry – all of it, not just the classic anthology pieces – still deserves the praise.

Why? Read his latest book, Rooms For Rent in the Outer Planets: Selected Poems 1962-1996. Selected and edited by Purdy himself (with an assist from Sam Solecki), it has more in common with his 1994 volume Naked With Summer in Your Mouth than with his Collected Poems. Like his last book (which wrests its title from “Transient,” a poem published in 1965), Rooms For Rent in the Outer Planets is also about documenting, mapping, tying together. Its focus can be described as memory expressed in, and as, both the history of language and the language of history. But Purdy’s own words, in “The Horseman of Agawa” for example, are more precise: “I change it all back into words again for that’s the best I can do/but they only point the way we came from for who knows where we are.”

As a “Selected” this book is exemplary: the collection of a mature poet who, as his own spin doctor, has access to his entire corpus. And what he does with it is both serious and breathtaking. Rooms For Rent in the Outer Planets frames four decades of writing and history in a way that’s a welcome antidote to our transitory and unstable culture of insatiable pop nostalgia: this is polished, provocative, and accessible poetry. Signature pieces like “At the Quinte Hotel,” “The Cariboo Horses,” and “The Country North of Belleville” present the full range of his voice, and resonate against newer or revised poems like “Piling Blood,” “Elegy for a Grandfather,” and the hauntingly beautiful “On Being Human” to produce a portrait of a writer who is still as concerned with the process and craft of poetry as the satisfaction of closure and publication. Simply put, this may in fact be the “best” selection of Purdy’s poetry because it seems to have been composed in order “to travel deep in himself/to meet himself as a stranger.” And this is precisely the kind of self-critical revisioning a book like this should strive for; as “The Dead Poet” wisely suggests, the purpose of this journey is, as it has always been for Purdy, to know himself as poet, to “know where the words come from.”