Brazilian Journal

Joan McGrath is a Toronto Board of Education library consultant.

P.K. Page, poet and painter, accompanied her husband Arthur Irwin (“A.”), Canada’s ambassador to Brazil, to that country in 1959. During her official stay in that brilliant, exotic, and unfamiliar country, Page proved herself to be an inspired observer, keeping a detailed diary expressive of tip-toe wonder at the new, technicolour world around her, the cities and villages she visited with her husband, the personages they met, her instructors in Portuguese and in art. Had the title not already been used by another author, she might well have claimed “I am a camera”; she observed people, places, ceremonies, plants and animals, even insects with the same careful scrutiny she devoted to the country’s art and artists, letting no moment, no flavour, to go waste. Combining the painter’s eye with the writer’s gift of words, Page’s natural curiosity and charm shine in this work of loving art that is a glorious vicarious experience of another world at a level unattainable to the ordinary traveller. An ambassadorial eye gazes upon a scene swirling with the colour that seems to suffuse every page of this marvelously readable, frequently very funny, and altogether enjoyable work. As a bonus, it is illustrated with examples of Page’s own art.