“This is my last book,” Al Purdy writes in his preface to Beyond Remembering, and with that simple phrase the reader is reminded of what was lost with Purdy’s death in April. Every word of Purdy’s collected poems sings with greatness, and sighs with that tremendous loss.

Beyond Remembering would be an important book were it only for Al Purdy’s now classic work. Poems like “The Cariboo Horses” and “The Others” brought the voice of Canada itself to the page; poems like “At The Quinte Hotel” and “The Country North of Belleville” brought the voices of the men who worked and lived on that land into Canadian literary parlance. Additional attention must be paid, though, to both the quality of the book itself and to the new poems it includes. Editor Sam Solecki and Harbour Publishing are to be commended for both the job they have done and the faith they have shown in Purdy and his legacy with such an ambitous project.

The handful of new poems included are the work of a poet at the height of his powers: even a cursory first reading places them alongside Purdy’s finest works. “Say the Names,” long a favourite at readings and much sought by Purdy’s fans, is collected here for the first time, and in reading it, one cannot help but hear Purdy’s voice echoing the words. “Her Gates Both East and West,” the final poem in Beyond Remembering (and presumably Purdy’s final poetic statement), is very simply one of his finest poems. More, it is probably the finest poem about Canada one is likely to read.

“A ‘collected poems’ is either a gravestone or a testimonial to survival,” Purdy writes in an afterword – Beyond Remembering is neither. The book is not a gravestone, but a living monument, and not a testimonial, but a legacy. It is telling that despite this great, grand book, these five decades of work, among the finest written by any Canadian, one still hungers for the words Purdy never got a chance to write.