P. K. Page - Writing

Writing

Page's career can be divided into two periods: the first being the 1940s and 1950s, and the second starting with her return to Canada in the 1960s.

Her early poems "were inward-looking, imaginary biographies," which "rely heavily on suggestive imagery and the detailed depiction of concrete situations to express social concerns and transcendental themes ... such poems as 'The Stenographers' and 'The Landlady' focus on isolated individuals who futilely search for meaning and a sense of belonging. 'Photos of a Salt Mine' considered one of Page's best early poems, examines how art both conceals and reveals reality"

Northrop Frye wrote about her 1954 volume, The Metal and the Flower, that "if there is anything such as 'pure poetry,' this must be it: a lively mind seizing on almost any experience and turning it into witty verse.... Miss Page's work has a competent elegance about it that makes even the undistinguished poems still satisfying to look at."

Her later works showed "a new austerity in form and a reduction in the number of images presented." As well, there is a difference in type of image: "her later poems are often set abroad and suggest a path of liberation for the isolated, alienated individual.... Such poems as 'Bark Drawing' and 'Cook's Mountains' contain images outside the self as does 'Cry Ararat!' — a poem concerning the reconciliation of internal and external worlds, in which Mount Ararat symbolizes a place of rest between."

Critic George Woodcock has said that Page's "most recent poems are more sharply and intensely visual than ever in their sensuous evocation of shape and color and space; their imagery 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."