The Essential P.K. Page.

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

The first publication in this welcome series, The Essential George Johnston, offered an admirable and judicious selection of the work of a scandalously undervalued Canadian poet, with a brief but shrewd introduction by fellow poet Robyn Sarah. This volume is very different. The editors claim that P.K. Page needs no introduction, so they don’t include one. It is true that she is far better known, but the intended readers of this book might well have benefited from some succinct literary-critical help.

Most of Page’s best-known poems are here, but it seems to me a mistake to include (without any explanations) excerpts from “Address at Simon Fraser,” “Melanie’s Note-Book,” and Hand Luggage. Again, they include two of Page’s glosas, but offer no definition of this unfamiliar verse form for beginning readers, while it is also assumed that neither “After reading Albino Pheasants by Patrick Lane” (where the italics, incidentally, are incorrect) nor “Poem Canzonic with Love from AMK” requires elucidation.

In addition, all poems are ordered alphabetically by title, on the premise that it is “impossible to distinguish the early poems from the later.” This is, to say the least, debatable. It is true that her poetic technique was sophisticated from the start, but many of her early poems written in the 1940s (mainly ignored here) are more politically and socially concerned, and the sense of colour she first explored in her Brazilian paintings of the late 1950s spills over into her later poetry. Moreover, no indication is given of where any individual poem is to be found. By contrast, Johnston’s poems are listed by volume, with title and date given in the table of contents for those who want them.

These may seem nitpicking objections, but I don’t think they are. Page is a highly intelligent poet with a broad range of experience, and the poems, though never impenetrable, are close-packed and often contain fairly erudite allusions. While there is much to be enjoyed in this selection, more thought and better planning could have produced a book in which the poet was displayed to better advantage.