Artist, poet and author, P.K. Page a cultural force
To mark Canada’s 150th birthday, we are counting down to Canada Day with profiles of 150 noteworthy British Columbians.
Shop assistant, sales clerk, polished diplomat’s wife, vivacious matron of the arts, uncompromising experimental poet, novelist, fine visual artist, author of amusing children’s books, generous mentor to young writers — Patricia Kathleen (P.K.) Page was a woman for all seasons. But critics say she stands as one of Canada’s finest poets “simply because she has such a beautiful way with words.”
Coal and Roses, a collection of intricate verses in the difficult form called a glosa — the poem must begin with four lines by another poet and each new stanza must close with a line from that quatrain, creating a meditative resonance between the two works — was published just after she died aged 93. It made the shortlist for the prestigious Griffin Poetry Prize. She won her first poetry prize 70 years earlier.
Born on the south coast of England in 1916, she was eldest child of Lionel Frank Page, a decorated war hero who rose to command the 50th (Calgary) Battalion during the First World War (he served as a Major-General in the Second), and Rose Laura Whitehouse.
Her father sent his little daughter poems from the trenches. Her mother illustrated them.
Page graduated from St. Hilda’s School for Girls in Calgary then went to work as a shop assistant in New Brunswick. Her father gave her a typewriter and provided an income that he couldn’t afford so that she could pursue her talent in Montreal, where she began associating with and learning from leading poets F.R. Scott and A.M. Klein.
She was a screenwriter at the National Film Board when she met, and in 1950 married, Arthur Irwin, a former editor of Maclean’s magazine. He became Canadian High Commissioner to Australia, then ambassador to Brazil and later Mexico before becoming publisher of the Victoria Daily Times in 1964.
She won the Governor General’s Award for poetry in 1954. Her paintings hang in the National Gallery, the Art Gallery of Ontario and private collections. She was an officer of the Order of Canada, a member of the Order of B.C., received the Lieutenant-Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence, and held six honorary degrees.
Page died in Victoria in 2010, but there’s immortality in her words, which eminent critic George Woodcock once said “takes us magically beyond any ordinary seeing into a realm of imagining in which the normal world is shaken like a vast kaleidoscope and revealed in unexpected and luminous relationships.”