The Filled Pen: Selected Non-fiction.

Naomi Brun is a freelance writer and a book reviewer for The Hamilton
Spectator.

P.K. Page is one of Canada’s most celebrated poets. She has written over two dozen books of poetry and has won many literary prizes for her efforts, perhaps most notably the 1954 Governor General’s Literary Award for The Metal and the Flower. Page is a Companion of the Order of Canada and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Zailig Pollock, editor of The Filled Pen, is a professor of English Literature at Trent University with a special interest in poetry.

The Filled Pen is a curious work. In this book, Pollock has assembled, edited and annotated a disparate collection of Page’s writings. He includes forewords, afterwords, magazine articles, and speeches on a broad range of topics in the volume. One would expect that the result would lack cohesion, but happily, this is not the case. Page is highly visible in her work, so whether she is preparing a talk for the Writers’ Development Trust or penning an afterword to Emily’s Quest, the reader gets a clear sense of her ideas, her emotions, and some of the key events in her life. In other words, Page herself is the thread that binds this book together.

The Filled Pen will be interesting for any enthusiast of 20th-century Canadian literature. Page is a very social writer, mingling happily with other authors on the contemporary Canadian scene, and her musings on some of this country’s greatest names are absolutely fascinating. Fortunately, her beautiful, poetic voice carries over successfully when writing essays, making her observations an absolute pleasure to read.