Page, P.K.

In Fine Form: The Canadian Book of Form Poetry

The Filled Pen: Selected Non-Fiction of P.K. Page

P.K. Page is best known as one of Canada's finest poets, but over the course of her career she has also written a number of essays - meditations - on her life and work, on the nature of art and the imagination, and on Canadian works of literature, painting, and film that have had special significance for her. As lovers of her poetry would hope and expect, these essays are beautiful, intelligent, moving, and delightfully quirky. The Filled Pen brings together the most important of these essays, including two previously unpublished: A Writer's Life and Fairy Tales, Folk Tales: The Language of the Imagination.. Zailig Pollock, Page scholar and professor of English at Trent University, has edited and annotated this collection for admirers of Page's work, general readers, and academics alike.

The essays, which cover a period of approximately forty years, reflect Page's enduring concerns as a verbal and visual artist with the power of art and the imagination to transcend the barriers that limit our perceptions of the world and our sympathies with our fellow human beings. Page is more interested in posing questions than imposing answers; and fascinated as she is by a wide range of ideas, from ancient mysticism to modern neurophysiology, it is images, endlessly evocative and suggestive, that matter to her most. Her comments on A.M. Klein from "A Sense of Angels", one of the most moving and perceptive tributes by one poet to another, apply very much to the P.K. Page we see in The Filled Pen: "For all his interest in the immediate world ... for all his acceptance of ideological and psychological theory, he seemed to reach beyond both to a larger reality."

Planet Earth

The title of this book is taken from Page's poem, `Planet Earth', which was chosen by the United Nations in 2000 for their celebratory program Year of Dialogue among Civilizations. Now poet and essayist Eric Ormsby, with Page's input, has selected the best of Page's poems originally collected in the two volumes of The Hidden Room (Porcupine's Quill, 1997). Page has also contributed to Planet Earth a small number of very recent poems. Ormsby has written a wonderful introduction to this new selection; he hastens to point out that deciding what to include was a most difficult process because there was so much to choose from. He goes on to say:

`It has become customary in Canada to describe P. K. Page as ``distinguished'', but that epithet betrays her. P. K. Page is simply too vivacious, too cunning, too elusive, to be monumentalized. She is in fact the supreme escape artist of our literature. Try to confine her in a villanelle and she scampers off into free verse. Peg her as a prose poet and she springs forth with a glosa. Categorize her as a poet who writes fiction but then note that you find very little ``poet's prose'' in her stories. Her characters are often incised with acid and a cruelly keen burin. She is the shrewdest of observers but at the same time she celebrates life, low and high, in all its manifestations. One of the finest and most distinctive Canadian poets, P. K. Page is no provincial. She is a citizen not merely of the world, but of the earth.'

Up on the Roof

`A flashlight, a frying pan, a library, a piece of marble -- you will encounter all these objects in the worlds P. K. Page invents for you in these pages. It's hard to imagine so many authorial impersonations in one book: a middle-aged gardener retreats from domestic chaos to the privacy of his rooftop shelter; a young man discovers his parents' library as solace for a broken heart; a child whose parents are pigeon breeders makes beautiful objects of feathers. All the stories have in common the impeccable verbal magic that is P. K. Page's unique poetic signature. And beneath is a profound meditation. What is fiction, what is fact? Is there anything we can call truth? And who is the tremulous `we', desperately trying to fix a location in this multiple, endlessly metamorphic, lonely cosmos. With an understanding earned by a lifetime of attention, Page assures us that this cosmos is threaded with love, if we are brave enough to search for it.' (Rosemary Sullivan )

Hand Luggage: A Memoir in Verse

`It has become customary in Canada to describe P. K. Page as ``distinguished'', but that epithet betrays her. P. K. Page is simply too vivacious, too cunning, too elusive, to be monumentalized. She is in fact the supreme escape artist of our literature. Try to confine her in a villanelle and she scampers off into free verse. Peg her as a prose poet and she springs forth with a glosa. Categorize her as a poet who writes fiction but then note that you find very little ``poet's prose'' in her stories. Her characters are often incised with acid and a cruelly keen burin. She is the shrewdest of observers but at the same time she celebrates life, low and high, in all its manifestations. One of the finest and most distinctive Canadian poets, P. K. Page is no provincial. She is a citizen not merely of the world, but of the earth.'

Starting in Calgary in the twenties, the young P K Page discovered first horses and then the pre-Raphaelites in cheap reproductions. In the thirties it was London, then back to the Maritimes and war and the distance of accented radio broadcasts from overseas. In the forties, in Montreal, there was snow as high as a house, cocoa at Murray's on Sherbrooke Street and poems by Frank Scott and Abe Klein read aloud in rented rooms.

In the fifties, marriage to Arthur Irwin and thence to Australia by steamer via Aden, Port Said and Ceylon. Kangaroos and platypus and tea with the wives of diplomats. Perth to Melbourne by train. Alice Springs, Kalgoorli and Ayers Rock. Briefly, New Guinea. Then Brazil, a pet marmoset christened B Fledermouse and drinks with Margot Fonteyn on the beach at Copacobana. From the sublime, to the ridiculous -- an honour guard of mariachis poised to greet John Diefenbaker in the shadow of Popocatepetl. The posting to Mexico was the last.

Her memoir ranges from the trivial -- the condition of pipes and wiring in embassy homes -- to the profound, her persistent search for spiritual certainty. P K Page met many of the dominant figures of the twentieth century, including Nehru, DeGaulle, Mountbatten, Tito and the Kennedys. But above all, she celebrates the senses, the beauty of it all.

Towards the end of a long and passionate life, Page shares in a most engaging form the highlights of a life lived to the full.

Evening Dance of the Grey Flies

The sun and the moon and other fictions (Found books)

This hilarious novel is about one man's fight against high-rise development and urban madness.

The Glass Air: Poems Selected and New

One of Canada's leading poets, P.K. Page has selected her best work for this definitive collection. It includes all of her classic poems as well as work previously published only in literary magazines. Two short essays about various aspects of poetry and nine original drawings by Page complete the volume.

The Glass Air : Poems Selected and New

Poems selected and new