It's taken a while, but Al Purdy is ready for his Toronto unveiling.
The ceremony on Tuesday afternoon in Toronto's Queen's Park, a few steps from the Ontario legislature, will reveal a sculpture of the great poet sitting and gazing off, half in thought, half in amusement.
Like Purdy himself, who produced a body of work which won him admiration as a poet of the people and who died in 2000, the sculpture is a study in contrasts. He is sitting in repose, but his straight back and the angle of his long, lanky legs suggest he's anything but a man slumped down on a rock.
Although his eyes face the oncoming traffic, he's not looking at anything in particular. In fact, you'd have to stand very far away from the sculpture to ever make eye contact with him.
"He's in this contemplative mood. He's kind of transcending the place," said Edwin Dam de Nogales, who along with his wife, Veronica, created the statue in their studio in Highgate, Ont., southwest of Toronto.
Early on, those behind the effort to erect the statue, primarily philanthropist and poetry supporter Scott Griffin and poet Dennis Lee, wanted a dynamic pose, preferably standing. But the sculptors came back with ideas for something entirely different, and they eventually won over everyone involved. Griffin also asked those in the literary community who knew Purdy to look at a small-scale version of the statue to make sure it reflected the man they knew.
And it was a conscious decision not to put Purdy on a pedestal, so to speak, but to have the down-to-earth poet sitting on a rock.
Originally planned in 2001, the project took so long that the artists had time to create and install 14 other public sculptures as the Purdy statue remained mired in city hall bureaucracy. As Griffin described it, the project had to go through multiple departments, each insisting on its own input.
Granted, placing a statue in Queen's Park warrants major attention, Griffin said. In fact, the only things Griffin and the other organizers of the statue had insisted upon was that they had final say in picking the artists, and that the sculpture had to be in Queen's Park.
"Immediately, we were offered anything but Queen's Park - some parkette somewhere," Griffin said. But Griffin says they wanted a more prominent placement as "part of a long-term aim to reintroduce poetry into the mainstream of our cultural lives."
And despite the bureaucratic morass, there was never any opposition to the idea that, if Toronto was going to erect a statue of a modern Canadian poet, it should be Purdy.
"He's not highfalutin," Griffin said. "He's right down to earth, and yet extremely elegant in his use of language. I would say he's the father of Canadian English, modern poetry."