Planet Earth: Poems Selected and New

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.

In 1997, the Porcupine’s Quill published The Hidden Room, a dazzling
two-volume collection of P.K. Page’s poetry, which demonstrated
unequivocally that, although for a considerable time a highly respected
figure, in the previous 20 years or so she had advanced resolutely into
the forefront of Canadian poetry. Now, five years later, they have
followed up that milestone work with a splendidly rich selection, by the
poet Eric Ormsby, who has also contributed a brief but deft and original
introduction.

Admirers of Page should not make the mistake of thinking that, if they
possess The Hidden Room, they can let this one pass. It contains one
wholly new poem, reprints “Alphabetically” and “Cosmologies”
which have appeared previously only in a limited edition, includes one
poem written especially for an oratorio, and another that, although
apparently published before, was somehow omitted from The Hidden Room.
And all of them show Page at her best.

Ormsby is not one of those anthologists who quietly reproduce the
selections of their predecessors. Can this be the only selection that
omits “The Stenographers”? “T-Bar” and “Photos of a Salt
Mine” are similarly absent. But in their place are excellent, subtler
poems that he makes us reconsider, perhaps appreciate for the first
time. He offers them, too, in his own personal rearrangement, which
bothered me at first since I am a firm believer in chronology. But
Ormsby forces me to see connections I had missed, and fully justifies
the procedure (though I still wonder a bit about the “glosa” poems
from Hologram scattered through the volume).

What struck me particularly about reading most of these pieces yet
again was the fact that, for all the glitter and filigree of Page’s
beautifully fashioned and unabashedly art-full poems, so many of them
are remarkable for their wonderful colloquial vigor. The new poem,
“Poem Canzonic with love to AMK,” contains the lines: “Not my life
only—your life, damn it! our / whole planetary life.” No one but
“PK” could have written that.

One thing is certain: no better volume of poems appeared in Canada in
2002.