When I was about eleven my gran took me with her to hear P. K. Page reading from Brazilian Journal, her memoir of the time she and her husband, a Canadian diplomat, spent in Brazil during his posting there. The reading was in a one-room art gallery in West Vancouver, a few minutes’ drive from my gran’s house, and almost every time I’ve seen her since then my gran has mentioned how much she wanted to have Page over for tea after the reading, and how she’ll always wish she’d just gone ahead and invited her.
A couple of years ago I finally read Brazilian Journal myself. A lot of it concerns setting up and keeping house in a humid climate and the many social engagements required of a diplomat and his wife, but I think the most interesting passages are Page’s reports on her development as a visual artist. The book includes several of her sketches and paintings, and it’s quite fascinating to read about her efforts (failed and successful) at capturing various subjects — plants, animals, rooms, different kinds of daylight.
When she died this past January I realized that with the exception of a few samples from anthologies, I hadn’t really read much of her poetry, so I picked up a copy of The Essential P. K. Page, a selection edited by Arlene Lampert and Théa Gray and published by Porcupine’s Quill in 2008. The poems included are all very tightly wound and lyrical, and Page seems to have a precise sense of how far to push a series of internal rhymes and associative sounds before it leaves the realm of natural speech and becomes a game played only for its own sake. I have to admit I didn’t enjoy all of it. There are pieces I found almost too refined, without an angle into the thought process at work or the tension of getting it down in these lines. But the ones that did strike me will, I think, stay with me for a long time. “A Backwards Journey” describes the childhood experience of finding infinity on a box of Dutch Cleanser that pictures a woman holding a can of Dutch Cleanser and on that can another woman holding another can, and so on. (For me it was the kid in shorts on the Borax box.) Here are the final few lines:
I think I knew that if no one called
and nothing broke the delicate jet
of my attention, that tiny image
could smash the atom of space and time.
(I wish we’d invited her back for tea.)
