Book Description

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 This collection is more than a mere re-publishing of previous work; Kaleidoscope includes poetry hitherto unpublished, and Page involved herself with the process of editing certain pieces until her death in January 2010.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.