About the Book
Table of Contents:
The Hidden RoomTo Begin Before I Was BornEmergence 15 The Crow 16 The Mole 16 Ecce Homo 17 The Clock of Your Pulse 19 Desiring Only 20 The Understatement 21 Remember the Wood 22 Winter Afternoon 23 Death 25 For G.E.R. 25 As on a Dark Charger 26Night GardenJourney 29 Round Trip 30 From Uncertain Ground 36 Personal Landscape 38 Magnetic North 39 Images of Angels 41 Christmas Eve ... 44 Earthquake 45 Arras 46 Photos of a Salt Mine 48 The Snowman 50 Mystics Like Miners 52 Stories of Snow 53 The Age of Ice 55 This Cold Man 59 This Is Another Spring 60 Elegy 62The Leaning Tower of SelfIf It Were You 65 The Sleeper 68 Alice 69 Paranoid 71 Portrait of Marina 72 Sailor 74 Only Child 75 Snapshot 77 Neurotic 78 Schizophrenic 79 Outcasts 80 Foreigner 81 Freak 82 Man with One Small Hand 84 Isolationist 85 The Sick 86 Probationer 88 Element 90 Sleeper 91 Nightmare 92 Subjective Eye 93 The Dreamer 94GenerationLandlady 97 Bed-Sitting Room 99 Offices 100 Prediction without Crystal 101 The Stenographers 102 Typists 103 Shipbuilding Office 104 The Petition 105 Presentation 107 Summer Resort 108 The Inarticulate 109 Panorama 110 Bank Strike 111 Squatters 112 The Permanent Tourists 113 Average 114 Quarrel 115 Election Day 116 Prophecy 118 No Flowers 119 Knitters 120 The Sentimental Surgeon 122 Generation 125 Cullen 127 Forgive Us 130 The Event 131 Puppets 132 Waking 134 Paradox 135 Migration 136 Draughtsman 137 Some There Are Fearless 138 Italian Prisoner of War 139 Old Man 140 Unable to Hate or Love 141Melanie's Nite-BookMelanie's Nite-Book 145Evening Dance of the Grey FliesFinches Feeding 158 The Flower Bed 159 Short Spring Poem ... 161 Out Here: Flowering 162 Domestic Poem ... 163 Conchita Knows Who Who Is 164 Cullen Revisited 165 For Mstislav Rostropovich ... 167 Motel Pool 169 Stefan 170 Ecology 171 Phone Call from Mexico 173 Custodian 177 Fly: On Webs 178 About Death 179 A Grave Illness 180 Ours 181 Voyager 183 Evening Dance of the Grey Flies 185 Unless the Eye Catch Fire 187 The Selves 209 The Filled Pen 210 Snowshoes 211 Albino Pheasants ... 213 The Maze 215 The First Part 216 Full Moon 220 Dwelling Place 221 Difficult 222 The Tethers 223 The Disguises 225 After Donne 225 Song ... Much of It Borrowed 226 Star-Gazer 226 Chinese Boxes 227 At Sea 228 Spinning 229 Three Gold Fish 230 The Yellow People ... 231Index of First Lines 235
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.
Review :
'If not "a shilling life", a glance at Who's Who in Canada will give you all the facts. Which are more than impressive. P K Page, born in 1916 and very much with us is, in brief, a phenomenon; a force majeur in Canadian literary and artistic life; a National Treasure. Her work to date, sprung from the praiseworthy ambition of the lavishly gifted, bestows upon us rich decades of protean accomplishment, of widespread honour and renown. Let us however concern ourselves here with the essential fictions -- with the beginning in delight and ending in wisdom, as Frost has it, of true poems; with this present testament of imaginative, intellectual and spiritual achievement: The Hidden Room: Collected Poems.'To immerse oneself in these two handsome volumes (elegantly complemented and informed throughout by the drawings and paintings of her "twin sister, / beautiful as Euclid", the painter P K Irwin) is to plunge into a deep-freighted, breaking wave of swirled delights and parlous undertows. It is, as with all such translucent ramparts of desire and abandon, best met head-on. This is not to say that one must read consecutively through the some four hundred and fifty pages of poetry and the one dangerous, liminal short story. The ordering of the volumes is credited to Stan Dragland, who "tackled material spanning sixty years and threaded it together in a manner uniquely his own." While the overall drift is chronological, the poems have been so intelligently interwoven that each of the volumes is a realized entity, as each is a reflection of the whole.' -- Richard Outram The Ottawa Citizen 'P.K. Page is a visionary, a descendant of Blake and the alchemist writers. She makes this connection herself in "Request to the Alchemist": "I am a tin whistle/ Blow through me/ Blow through me/ And make my tin/ Gold". Like Blake, Page is also an accomplished visual artist and would subscribe to his conviction that "We are led to Believe a Lie/ When we see not Thro' the Eye." This is the eye that can see beyond habitual perception, the eye with the power to rend what D. H. Lawrence called the "great umbrella between mankind and Titans in the wild air." That is why Page quotes Theodore Roszak: "Unless the eye catch fire/ The God will not be seen."Page's poems are spattered with delphinium blue, Van Gogh yellow, and garden green, but I am certain that a word count would confirm the preponderance of gold. There is the poem "Three Gold Fish" with its allusion to Blake's "Tyger", the "gold calligraphy" of grey flies in sunlight, and "Aurum", with its artist's "sparks" of gold leaf. Gold is the colour of transformation, of turning dross into the extraordinary. In the telling poem "A Backwards Journey", Page describes her childhood habit of staring at a can of Dutch Cleanser on whose label "a smaller Dutch Cleanser woman/ was holding a smaller Dutch Cleanser can." And so on, the images repeating themselves in diminishing size until the child believes "that tiny image/ could smash the atom of space and time." The key to this poem is the word "Cleanser", which is repeated seven times. Blake wrote, "If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite."The mystical and transcendental are fundamental to Page's sensibility. Yet when she is most obviously a visionary, her poetry is least effective. The "gold smiles" of her angels are unconvincing; her golden seraphim are too assured to create the tension on which poetry thrives. She becomes successful when her vision is acted out in natural settings using less "poetic" symbolism, and when the visionary world is counterpoised with the humdrum, banal, or violent. In an effective poem like "The Bands & the Beautiful Children", music and the imagination are set against the reality of "straggling grass" and "men tired and grumbling". In her best poems she goes beyond such dualities. "Stories of Snow" tells of those living in a world of "great flowers.with reds and blues" who dream of a world of whiteness, hunters, and death. What makes this poem remarkable, aside from its dream-inducing cadence and its paradoxical rhymes, is the irony that the white, violent terrain is also gentle, mystical, and as beautiful as the lush, colourful one. This blurring of the typical dichotomies gives the poem a layered depth, a metaphysical aura.' Books in Canada
