Page, P.K.

In Fine Form: The Canadian Book of Form Poetry

The Innocent Traveller (New Canadian Library)

Precocious in childhood, irrepressible in old age, Miss Topaz Edgeworth’s singular accomplishment is to live out an entire century in unflagging – and mostly oblivious – optimism. At once outmoded and unconventional, tyrannical and benign, Topaz leads a largely unexamined life. But the magical quality of her consciousness, revealed through stunning narrative technique, makes her into one of the most delightful characters in Canadian literature. Published in 1949, The Innocent Traveller is Ethel Wilson’s most original literary achievement.

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 The Filled Pen brings together the most important of these essays, including two previously unpublished: A Writer's Life and Fairy Tales, Folk Tales: The Language of the Imagination..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."

A Kind of Fiction

Acclaimed poet P. K. Page weaves together an astonishing range of characters and themes in this remarkable selection of stories written over the last fifty years and collected here for the first time. A Kind of Fiction bears witness to an accomplished prose stylist and displays the same lively and witty intelligence that established her reputation as one of Canada's finest poets.

Page emerges as a writer with an agile and playful imagination, comfortable with a range of narrative styles that include the comic and surreal plots of her early pieces from the 1940s, adaptations of Indian and Sufi tales, and the complex psychological portraits of her recent work. Despite the variety of styles and themes, all the stories in this collection bear the imprint of a refined artistic vision and a sense of technique and form which has been the defining characteristic of her distinguished body of poetry.

P.K. Page has written some of the best poems published in Canada for over five decades. In addition to winning the Governor General's award for poetry in 1957, she was appointed a Companion of the Order of Canada in 1999. She is the author of more than a dozen books, which include ten volumes of poetry, a novel, selected short stories, three books for children, and a memoir entitled Brazilian Journal based on her extended stay in Brazil. A two-volume edition of her collected poems, The Hidden Room (PQL), was published in 1997.

The Glass Air : Poems Selected and New

The Hidden Room : Collected Poems, Vol.1 (Hidden Room)

The Hidden Room is filled with treasure gathered from over five decades of some of the best poetry ever written in Canada. Almost all of the poetry P. K. Page has published in volume form is here, all the way from Unit of Five (1944) to Hologram (1994), together with a good many unpublished poems and poems hitherto published only in magazines, from all stages of her career.

A section of luminous new poems completes the volume. Evening Dance of the Grey Flies and Hologram appear substantially as first published, though virtually every other section has undergone thoughtful reassessment by the author with the assistance of editor Stan Dragland. The Hidden Room is something more than simply a mechanical Collected. The inclusion of uncollected and new poems has demanded a re-choreographing, a reassortment of familiar poems into new families.

The Hidden Room is quite possibly the best collection of verse ever published in this country. This is the essential, rather than the entire P. K. Page, a lifetime of work that any poet would be proud to call their own.

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.'

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.

Poems selected and new