Hologram: A Book of Glosas

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.

Hologram consists of 14 glosas. A glosa (the word is absent from most
dictionaries and literary handbooks) is a poem elaborated out of four
continuous lines chosen from a previous poet. Four stanzas of 10 lines
then elaborate the thought, “their concluding lines taken
consecutively from the quatrain.” There are some additional rhyming
requirements. In the lucid foreword from which I have quoted, P.K. Page
tells us that the form was used by courtly Spanish poets and dates back
to the medieval period.

Artifice? Certainly. Page found the process of writing
“challenging—rather in the way a crossword puzzle is challenging,”
which sounds somewhat flippant until one remembers that the art of
poetry is primarily the art of verbal arrangement. It is an art Page has
practised memorably and decorously throughout her life, and she
surpasses herself here. She decided to make this volume “a book of
homage” to some of the poets with whom she recognizes an affinity (not
all of them, since some do not write in a style that makes glosas
possible). And the affinity ranges widely—Seferis, Rilke, Neruda, and
Sappho appear, along with poets writing in English, whether British
(Graves and Dylan Thomas), American (Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop), or
Canadian (Cohen, Woodcock). Page is not merely a Canadian poet but a
poet of the world.

Her amazing achievement is that, while she writes in the manner of the
poet whose lines she translates, she remains indisputably and splendidly
herself: “So let the fabulous philosopher / catch Phaeton in his lens
and think he is / the thing itself, not knowing all the else / he is
become. But you will see it clear/ without evasion by a single
metaphor.” The last line is Wallace Stevens’, but in the new context
it becomes quintessential P.K. Page.

Page has never written better than this. Though always technically
assured, she has never demonstrated such faultless control of the poetic
line. Constance Rooke has called her “Canada’s finest poet.” Once
I considered that an exaggeration; now I think she is right.