Home of Renowned Canadian Poet in Jeopardy

According to this article from the Edmonton Journal:

Go to rural New Hampshire and you can visit the Frost Place outside Franconia, a house where the American poet Robert Frost lived for five rewarding years. It's now a museum and a non-profit centre for the arts.

Go to rural Wales and you can visit the Boathouse in Laugharne where the poet Dylan Thomas spent his last four tumultuous years. It's now a heritage centre.

Yet in this country, the house that was constructed and inhabited for more than 40 years by one of Canada's finest poets, Al Purdy, soon may be lost to the public, even demolished. Efforts to preserve it have so far failed to raise enough cash.

A bit more on the home's history:

With the help of his wife and fatherin-law, he began by building his own home - a modest A-frame cottage near the shore of Roblin Lake, constructed of wood and stray stone, a morsel of this, a fragment of that. Nobody would call it an architectural masterpiece. But it's redolent of literary history. The young Mi-chael Ondaatje, an aspiring writer new to Canada, went to stay there; Purdy welcomed him, as he did so many others.

His poem House Guest describes an earlier, longer visit by the communist writer Milton Acorn; for two months the pair quarrelled about politics, drank, wrote poems and listened to "how the new house built with salvaged old lumber / bent a little in the wind and dreamt of the trees it came from."

Purdy loved the landscape, indeed the entire country, with a rough and sometimes awkward passion; and he had a rare gift for transforming awkwardness and silence into words that could catch fire.

Read the rest after the jump.