The Hidden Room: Collected Poems, 2 vols.
St. Andrews, B.A.
P. K. Page. Erin, Ont. Porcupine's Quill. 1997. 228; 238 pages,
ill. Can$18.95. ISBN 0-88984-190-X; 0-88984-193-4.
The "hidden room" is P. K. Page's synecdoche for the
poetic imagination, which she variously compares to "the
Bodleian," "a magic square," and "the number
nine." The inestimable critic George Woodcock has named Page among
the centrifugal forces in English Canada's ongoing "Golden
Age" of poetry and fiction. With strategic midcentury poets like
Dorothy Livesay and Leonard Cohen, Page has helped clear a path for new
and resonant poetic voices like those of Michael Ondaatje and Margaret
Atwood.
Page's influence covers over forty years and has endured, in
part, because she has usually managed to understand change .just ahead
of the wave. This awareness of Canada's cultural dynamism (and that
of the wider world) has been clearly manifest since Cry Ararat! (1967),
which heralded her triumphant return to poetry, an art form as
revivified by her extensive travels to South America as her visual art,
for which she is also widely acclaimed. (Her drawings, in fact,
constitute a beautiful bonus within these two volumes and highlight the
visual precision of her poetic language.)
Technically, too, Page's early poems managed to bridge formalism
with free verse at a time when critics sometimes dismissed the latter as
a dangerous tendency, rather like a potential addition or a personality
disorder. Consider, for example, the interior music and design of
"Star-Gazer": "The very stars are justified. / The galaxy
/ italicized."
But this praise for Page's historical importance is not meant to
suggest that her achievement is a thing of the past. She still dwells
comfortably in that "hidden room" which seems to be expanding
rather than contracting with age. "Hologram," composed in
1995, testifies to the continuing vitality and depth of her poetic gift.
These glosses or meditations on key phrases by eminent poets from
Elizabeth Bishop and W. H. Auden to Pablo Neruda and Sappho showcase
Page's intellectual and metaphysical reach. For example, in
"Autumn" she weaves this stanza around Rilke's famous
line (italicized) from his "Autumn Day" to explore the terrors
of loneliness, chosen or imposed:
The whole world is a cup one could hold in one's hand like a
stone warmed by that same summer sun. But the dead or the near dead are
now all knucklebone. Whoever is alone will stay alone.
Page has long been aware of the umbilical cord tying her creative
life and those poets who have nourished hers; in "Song ... Much of
It Borrowed" from Dance of the Grey Flies (1981) she celebrated
Donne's idea of God as an angel in an angel, announcing nothing
less than that "God is a poet in a poet / a poem in a poem / and a
word in a word." There are few Canadian poems more famous than her
"Stories of Snow," few more sagacious than "Mystics Like
Miners," which ends with the reminder, "They explore / in
wisdom, never innocence."
Northrop Frye once declared of P. K. Page's art that if there
were "such a thing as 'pure poetry,' this must be
it." Neither a venomous critic nor an unduly generous one, he seems
to have found the best way to assess The Hidden Room. Page's two
volumes of collected poems constitute one of the finest collections
available in any era, in an), language.
B. A. St. Andrews SUNY Health Science Center, Syracuse
