P. K. Page needs no introduction. This is a poet who writes in many genres and on an infinite number of subjects. The source of her poetry is always love -- whether in vivid portraits of her inner and outer landscapes; startling insights into the past, the present, the future; illumination of some tiny detail of ordinary life; or admonishments for our neglect of the earth and of each other. Page is an alchemist who turns language into pure gold, a magician who dazzles with sleight of mind. The Essential P. K. Page is perceptive, elegant, romantic (yet never sentimental), sometimes downright funny, wholly conscious.

Table of Contents

7 Foreword 9 Address at Simon Fraser (excerpt) 10 After Rain 12 After Reading Albino Pheasants by Patrick Lane 14 Ah, by the golden lilies 16 Ancestors (from Melanie's Nite-Book) 18 Another Space 20 Arras 22 As on a Dark Charger 23 A Backwards Journey 24 Beside You 25 Custodian 26 Deaf Mute in the Pear Tree 28 Dwelling Place 28 Ecology 29 Evening Dance of the Grey Flies 30 The Filled Pen 31 Funeral Mass 32 A Grave Illness 33 Hand Luggage (excerpt one) 33 Hand Luggage (excerpt two) 34 Hand Luggage (excerpt three) 35 Hughes 36 Inebriate 38 Leather Jacket 39 Like a Cruise Ship 40 Macumba: Brazil 42 Man with One Small Hand 43 The Mole 43 Motel Pool 44 The New Bicycle 45 On Educating the Natives 45 Picking Daffodils 46 Poem Canzonic with love to AMK 48 Remembering 49 The Selves 50 Soft Travellers 52 Star-Gazer 52 Stefan 53 Stories of Snow 55 Suddenly 56 This Heavy Craft 56 This Sky 57 Traveller's Palm 58 Winter Morning 58 The World 59 Young Girls 60 Zero Is Zero 62 About P. K. Page

About the Author

P. K. Page wrote some of the best poems published in Canada over the last 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 was the author of more than a dozen books, including ten volumes of poetry, a novel, selected short stories, eight books for children, and a memoir, entitled Brazilian Journal, based on her extended stay in Brazil with her late husband Arthur Irwin, who served as the Canadian Ambassador there from 1957 to 1959. A two-volume edition of Page's collected poems, The Hidden Room (Porcupine's Quill), was published in 1997.In addition to writing, Page painted, under the name P. K. Irwin. She mounted one-woman shows in Mexico and Canada. Her work was also exhibited in various group shows, and is represented in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the Victoria Art Gallery, among others.P. K. Page was born in England and brought up on the Canadian prairies. She died on the 14th of January, 2010.

Reviews

'Elegant, rigorous, fresh, P. K. Page's work sings with a voice of independent character and maenad conjecture. It is a creature that lives on its own terms and terrain. It is startling, authoritative, and anti-sentimental, able to bear cool as well as passionate gazing at our own species. Her poems are always thinking -- each line is thinking, while its six senses remain impeccably alert. Her poems live by wit, wisdom, sass, suspense and a muscular lissome synapse and diction. They are daring in scope, meticulous in accomplishment, and boldly moral -- with a lovely flavour of amoral verve! We fall under the charm of her reasoning, of her fecund, fastidious imagination, of her many musics, and of her necessariness to us, her essentialness.' -- Griffin Prize citation '... Northrop Frye uses the phrases "metallic glitter" and "imaginative wisecracks" to describe Page's poems... Those who enjoy "glitter" in poetry will appreciate the diction, imagery, and acoustics of Page's phrasings, as in "Evening Dance of the Grey Flies".' -- Maxianne Berger Rover Arts Montreal 'Born in England, Patricia Kathleen (P. K.) Page moved to Canada in 1919, at the age of three. She has lived in New Brunswick, Quebec, Manitoba, and Alberta and now makes her home in British Columbia, in the capital city of Victoria on Vancouver Island. At age 92 she is writing more than ever. This latest collection of her poetry, The Essential P. K. Page, is aptly named. Any fan of her work, of Canadiana, of poetry in general, needs to own this book. The works contained within are dense and chewy, both requiring and creating thought, and keeping all five of the reader's senses involved in the pleasure of reading them. What makes Page's poems so unusual is their apparent rejection of the idea that thought and emotion, thinking and feeling, are different and must be kept separate. P. K. Page thinks with her heart, loves with her mind, and leaves us a wonderful, tangled mess of imagination and possibility. I hope she lives well into her triple-digits, and brings us many more portraits painted as beautifully, as movingly as The Essential P. K. Page.' -- Beth Carswell abebooks