Kaleidoscope: Selected Poems

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The Porcupine's Quill, 2010 - Poetry - 256 pages

The name P. K. Page is synonymous with ‘artist’: she won the Governor General’s award for poetry in 1957, was appointed a Companion of the Order of Canada in 1999, and her paintings are found in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Canada and the Art Gallery of Ontario, among others. Her voice is luminous, her focus grounded in reality, and her mastery of poetic form is nigh unmatched in Canadian literature.


Selected by Zailig Pollock, the poetry in Kaleidoscope is elegant, technically exquisite and full of marvels, and the chronological presentation reveals Page’s growth as a poet over her long lifetime. This collection is more than a mere re-publishing of previous work; Kaleidoscope includes poetry hitherto unpublished, and Page involved herself with the process of editing certain pieces until her death in January 2010.


Kaleidoscope: Selected Poems is the first in a series of volumes to be published over the next ten years as a complement to an online hypermedia edition of the Collected Works of P. K. Page. The online edition is intended for scholarly research, while Kaleidscope offers a beautiful and inspiring text to be enjoyed by those who love and wonder at the achievement of Canada’s greatest poet.

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About the author (2010)

Seraphim

In the dream it was the seraphim who came
golden, six-winged
with eyes of aquamarine
and set my hair aflame
and spoke in a language which written down --
an elegant script of candelabras and chalices --
spelled out my name
but it was not my name
The mornings following were bright as wings
sky's intricate cirrus
the feathers under his wings
the wind's great rush
the bladed beat of his wings
Mare's tails traced the passage of his seraphic chariot
Hummingbirds ruby-throated roared and braked
in the timeless isinglass air and burned like coals
high in the fronds of a brass palm sunbirds sang
girasoles swung their cadmium-coloured hair
and I heard the seraphim telling once again
the letters of my name
but my name was lost in the spoken syllables

by Summer, 1976 1997

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