P. K. Page - Griffin Poetry Prize (original) (raw)

P.K. Page is the author of more than a dozen books, including poetry, a novel, short stories, essays and books for children. Awarded a Governor General’s Award for poetry (The Metal and the Flower) in 1954, Page was also on the shortlist for the Griffin Poetry Prize (Planet Earth) in 2003 and awarded the BC Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Literary excellence in 2004. P.K. Page died in January 2010.

Coal and Roses 2010 Shortlist

Finalist in:

2010 2010
2003 2003

Judges’ Citation

How heartening to be reminded that creativity, zest and curiosity can endure, even flourish, into great old age. Coal and Roses is wholly unusual and possibly unique.

Though we were not to know it, Coal and Roses was the last book [of poetry] to be published by P.K. Page, appearing months before her death at the age of 93. Therefore it marks the close of a long and creative life. How heartening to be reminded that creativity, zest and curiosity can endure, even flourish, into great old age. Coal and Roses is wholly unusual and possibly unique. It’s a collection of 21 glosas – a glosa being an intricate difficult form. Each poem begins with four lines from another poet – Anna Akhmatova, Thom Gunn, Zbigniew Herbert and Ted Hughes all feature – and those four lines are then spun and meditated upon by Page herself, to form a new poem, where every stanza closes with a line from the master. The result is a history of poetry, a kind of memoir and a homage from one nearing life’s end, to her forebears and colleagues. It is a fully achieved project, which does what literature does best – abolishes the borders of life and death, time and culture and language, and sets all in a great conversation.

Selected poems

by P. K. Page

Let us consider kissing. Nothing to do with love.

Or something. Sometimes.

But not as world-wide a custom as one might suppose.

That being so

I am curious to know

what, in those unkissing cultures,

they do with their lips?

from Alphabetical

P. K. Page

In his blackest suit

the father carries the coffin

It is light as a box of Kleenex

He carries it in one hand

It is white and gold

A jewel box

Their baby is in it

In the unconscionable weather

the father sweats and weeps

The mother leans

on the arms of two women friends

By the sacred light of the church

they are pale as gristle

The priests talk Latin

change their elaborate clothes

their mitres, copes

their stoles embroidered by nuns

Impervious to grief

their sole intention

is the intricate ritual

of returning a soul to God

this sinless homunculus

this tiny seed

Funeral Mass

P. K. Page

Green, how much I want you green.

Great stars of white frost

come with the fish of darkness

that opens the road of dawn.

– Somnambular Ballad (Stephen Spender and G.L. Gili, trs.)

Landscape of crystals

rock salt and icebergs

white trees, white grasses,

hills forged from pale metals

padlock and freeze me

in the Pleistocene.

See my skin wither

heart become brittle

cast as the Snow Queen.

Green, how much I want you green.

Green oak, green ilex

green weeping willow

green grass and green clover

all my lost youth.

Come before springtime

before the brown locust

come like the rain

that blows in the night

and melts to fine dust

great stars of white frost.

Water, sweet water

chortling, running

the chinooks of my childhood

warm wind, the ripple

of icicles dripping

from my frozen palace.

How sweet the water

moonstones and vodka

poured from a chalice

with the fish of darkness.

Come water, come springtime

come my green lover

with a whistle of grass

to call me to clover.

A key for my lock

small flowers for my crown.

The Ice Age is over,

green moss and green lichen

will paint a green lawn

that opens the road of dawn.

Green, How Much I Want You Green

P. K. Page

And the first age was Gold.

Without laws, without law’s enforcers.

This age understood and obeyed

What had created it.

– “Creation,” Ted Hughes

What was, before the world

no one can imagine

and then the Creator created

winds and skies and seas.

Earth, with its fruits and trees,

before the world was old,

blossomed in sweet profusion.

Fish and flesh and fowl

were, magically, manifold.

And the first age was Gold.

And man appeared, and woman

innocent, full of wonder.

Eden, one myth called it,

Paradise, another.

Whatever the name, it was

flawless, an age of glory,

golden, sun-filled, honeyed,

lacking both crime and cunning.

It was a consummate order –

Without laws, without law’s enforcers.

Day followed night, the sky

cloudless, the air sweet-scented.

Night followed day, the stars

bright – Orion striding,

Cygnus, the Southern Cross,

the Lesser Water Snake.

All in their proper places

linked to the earth and shining –

a cosmological guide

this age understood and obeyed

Minerals, plants and all

animals and humans

behaved according to

their original design.

Birds in their flight and flowers,

trees multifoliate,

salt in the mine, and water –

each honoured and celebrated

harmonized with and trusted

what had created it.

The Age of Gold

P. K. Page

Intractable between them grows

a garden of barbed wire and roses.

Burning briars like flames devour

their too innocent attire.

Dare they meet, the blackened wire

tears the intervening air.

Trespassers have wandered through

texture of flesh and petals.

Dogs like arrows moved along

pathways that their noses knew.

While the two who laid it out

find the metal and the flower

fatal underfoot.

Black and white at midnight glows

this garden of barbed wire and roses.

Doused with darkness roses burn

coolly as a rainy moon:

beneath a rainy moon or none

silver the sheath on barb and thorn.

Change the garden, scale and plan;

wall it, make it annual.

There the briary flower grew.

There the brambled wire ran.

While they sleep the garden grows,

deepest wish annuls the will:

perfect still the wire and rose.

The Metal and the Flower

P. K. Page

Every other day I am an invalid.

Lie back amng the pillows and white sheets

lackadaisical O lackadaisical.

Brush my hair out like a silver fan.

Allow myself to be wheeled into the sun.

Calves’-foot jelly, a mid-morning glass of port,

these I accept and rare azaleas in pots.

The nurses humour me. The call me ‘dear’.

I am pilled and pillowed into another sphere

and there my illness rules us like a queen,

is absolute monarch, wears a giddy crown

and I, its humble servant at all times, am its least

serf on occasion and excluded from the feast.

Every other other day I am as fit

as planets circling.

I brush my hair into a golden sun,

strike roses from a bush,

rare plants into pots

blossom within the green of my eyes, I am

enviable O I am enviable.

Somewhere in between the two, a third

wishes to speak, cannot make itself heard,

stands unmoving, mute, invisible,

a bolt of lightning in its naked hand.

The Selves

P. K. Page