Kaleidoscope: Selected Poems

by P.K. Page

Kaleidoscope is the first in a series of ten volumes to be published over the next ten years as a complement to an online hypermedia edition of the Collected Works of P. K. Page . Listed chronologically by date of composition, the poetry in Kaleidoscope is fluid, wondrous and technically exquisite, drawing on subjects great and small, and it offers a comprehensive look at one of Canada's most beloved and brilliant poets.

Genres: Poetry, Canada

256 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2010

About the author

Patricia Kathleen Page, CC, OBC, FRSC, commonly known as P. K. Page, was a Canadian poet. She was born in Swanage, Dorset, England and moved with her family to Canada in 1919. She spent the last years of her life in Victoria, British Columbia. P.K. Page was an author of many published books of poetry, fiction, travel diaries, essays and children's books. Her poems were translated into other languages. By special resolution of the United Nations, in 2001 her poem Planet Earth was read simultaneously in New York, the Antarctic and the South Pacific to celebrate the International Year of Dialogue Among Civilizations.

She was also known as a visual artist, having exhibited her work at a number of venues in and out of Canada. Her works are in permanent collections of National Gallery of Canada and Art Gallery of Ontario.

Reviews

[aris]

hm... you know page it seems i was unfamiliar with your game

[Alan · Rating 5 out of 5]

P.K. Page shares a place at the top with other great Canadian poets like A. J. M. Smith, F.R. Scott, A.M. Klein, Irving Layton, Dorothy Livesay, and Leonard Cohen. Her writing is profoundly beautiful and exploratory. Her poetry is of particular importance to modernists as the question of impersonality and sentimentalism (major problems plaguing the genre - especially for female modernist poets) is portrayed as a constant struggle with no clear solution ( that is, until the final stages of her life). Through her very convenient metaphor of the Eye's-I, the boundaries that divide the I from the other are eventually addressed in her later poetry. This edition edited by Zalig Pollak does not really focus on the creative gap in Page's life, where for a prolonged period of time, Page essentially stopped writing poetry. The end of this gap marks her great epiphany, as the radically different style of her latter writing reveals. Her solution to impersonality was to recognize that the impersonal and personal are not separate but the same; the book's title, Kaleidoscope, suggests that everything is both beauty and logic, personal and impersonal.
While there is a lot more to say about Page's impact on modernist poetry, the beauty of her writing, in all its colours, allusions to the Bible, Canada, Brazil, and the Second World War, is more than enough to make her worthy of any reader's time.

[Camila · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a pleasure to read, and a great introduction to P.K. Page for me. I like the chronological organization and endnotes in this edition, and Page's drawings are a nice complement to her poems. I'm not crazy about every single piece in this collection (for example, I find some of her Brazil poems a bit stereotypical - but I'm biased), but most of the pieces are simply delightful. I'm a bit surprised at how unknown she seems to be in Canada... glad I found her!

[Matthew Molinaro]

the jury's still out on page. I really enjoyed her when I was first introduced a few years ago but then reading her this year made me realize I'm not a huge fan of impersonal poetry and I think some of the techniques can take away from poetic vision.

I think I was an outsider in the class environment on this