When Al Purdy published his fourth book of poems in 1959 (the first book of his that critics took seriously) under the title of The Crafte So Long to Lerne, he was wryly celebrating the long period of apprenticeship in which he had begun to find his own poetic voice. He was then forty-one, having been born in 1918 in the small agricultural community of Wooller in southeastern Ontario. His father was a farmer, and his Loyalist ancestors, who came to Upper Canada in the 1780s during the years after the American War of Independence, had lived in that area for a century and a third. Much of his poetry has celebrated these forebears and the land which they won from the wilderness and which by the time of his early manhood the bush was already reclaiming. As he wrote in "My Grandfather's Country" (collected in Being Alive, 1978):

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