The Hidden Room
(collected poems,
two volumes)

A Kind of Fiction
(stories)

Judges' Citation: `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.'

The title of this book is taken from Page's poem, `Planet Earth', which was chosen by the United Nations in 2000 for their celebratory program Year of Dialogue among Civilizations. Now poet and essayist Eric Ormsby, with Page's input, has selected the best of Page's poems originally collected in the two volumes of The Hidden Room (Porcupine's Quill, 1997). Page has also contributed to Planet Earth a small number of very recent poems. Ormsby has written a wonderful introduction to this new selection; he hastens to point out that deciding what to include was a most difficult process because there was so much to choose from. He goes on to say:

`It has become customary in Canada to describe P. K. Page as ``distinguished'', but that epithet betrays her. P. K. Page is simply too vivacious, too cunning, too elusive, to be monumentalized. She is in fact the supreme escape artist of our literature. Try to confine her in a villanelle and she scampers off into free verse. Peg her as a prose poet and she springs forth with a glosa. Categorize her as a poet who writes fiction but then note that you find very little ``poet's prose'' in her stories. Her characters are often incised with acid and a cruelly keen burin. She is the shrewdest of observers but at the same time she celebrates life, low and high, in all its manifestations. One of the finest and most distinctive Canadian poets, P. K. Page is no provincial. She is a citizen not merely of the world, but of the earth.'

In selecting from the two volumes of her poems I have been guided by that instinct of vitality which emanates from all her finest work. The choice has been hard because there is so much. In her wonderful poem `Planet Earth', which P. K. Page chose as the title for this new selection, she begins with the lovely line about the earth:

    `It has to be loved the way a laundress loves her linens,
    the way she moves her hands caressing the fine muslins ...'

This is the way too, I would suggest, in which P. K. Page's poems should be read and savoured, with all the senses, with the tips of the fingers and the surfaces of the skin, with that utmost attentiveness earth itself demands from us.

`[T]here is something terrifying about this book [The Hidden Room], the judgment it casts on our feckless literary age: both in how it recuperates the technical artistry that has been abandoned in this country and in how it refurbishes poetry's bygone ambition of fitting together, as palpable and as precisely as possible, experience and language.'
    - Carmine Starnino, The Montreal Gazette

`P. K. Page (to paraphrase her remarks on George Johnston) asks difficult, serious questions neither she nor we can answer. She celebrates the world of our comings and goings. She reminds us that we are human and that we can love one another and she rarely forgets or lets us forget that "No man may him hyde / From Deth holow-eyed."'
    - Richard Outram, The Citizens Weekly

`P. K. Page shares with her 17th-century predecessors, such as John Donne, a refusal to separate head and heart. What you hear in her work is the sound of intelligence brought crisply into focus.'
    - Robert Enright, The Globe and Mail

In addition to writing, Page paints, under the name P. K. Irwin. She has mounted one-woman shows in Mexico and Canada. Her work has also been 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 has lived in the Maritimes and in Montreal. After years abroad in Australia, Brazil and Mexico, she now makes her permanent home in Victoria, British Columbia.