P. K. Page (Patricia Kathleen Page) Biography

Canadian poet, born in Swanage, Dorset; she grew up in Canada from 1919 onward and was educated at St Hilda's School for Girls in Calgary, Alberta. She was among the founders of Preview magazine in 1942. From 1953 to 1964 she lived in Australia, Brazil, and Mexico, where her husband was successively Canadian Ambassador. As Ten as Twenty (1946), her first collection of verse, displayed the political concern shared by many of the poets associated with Preview; more personal and compassionate treatments of social themes were presented in The Metal and the Flower (1954), which contained vivid treatments of spiritual and material impoverishment in urban settings. She published no further collections until Cry Ararat! (1967); the subdued pessimism of earlier work is supplanted by an affirmative heightening of her visual responses in poems inspired by her experiences of Brazil and Mexico. These qualities develop into the visionary clarity apparent in Evening Dance of the Grey Flies (1981). The Glass Air (1985) is a selected edition which includes previously uncollected material. Among her other works are the autobiographical Brazilian Journal (1987) and the highly imaginative short stories of The Sun and the Moon, and Other Fictions (1973).