A poet's identity may be found in the habits of feeling and insight that are particularly, almost obsessively, her own and which distinguish her poetry from that of other writers. Occasionally an individual poem can be found which defines a poet's sensibility. The poem "After Rain" provides such a focus in P. K. Page's poetry. With a remarkable acuity, she explores the dimensions of her own poetic temperament, exposing both the strengths and the potential vulnerability of her art. Like so many of Page's poems, "After Rain" describes a simple domestic occurrence (in this case a woman and a gardener examining a garden) pushed to a level of hallucinatory intensity where insight becomes possible. Here, the poet describes her mind as a woman's wardrobe of female whimsy and there follows a brilliant complex of images, propelled by fantastic associative leaps. (p. 32)

Rarely has one so complete a sense of a poet luxuriating in language. Yet the whole momentum of the poem is reversed with the remarkable line: "I suffer shame in all these images." This line, with its powerful anguish, is the pivot of Page's poetics, for here she articulates one of the deepest impulses of her work. She has such a remarkable verbal gift that the image-making process can become almost too seductive. In her hands, images are self-generating, and multiply and reproduce in a kind of literary osmosis. Thus one has the sense in her early poetry of images taking over and sidetracking the poem into perspectives that the theme does not suggest. "After Rain" is an extraordinary poem in that Page senses not only the technical, but also the theoretical implications of her susceptibility to image. (pp. 32-3)

Throughout [Page's novel The Sun and the Moon], there is a curious sense of reciprocity, of fluid interchange between the human and the natural. The heroine's empathic gift permits her to perceive the static reality of inanimate things; chameleon-like, she can know "the still sweet ecstasy of a change in kind." The author is ambiguous in her attitude toward her heroine; on the one hand, her protean gift of self-effacement gives her access to ecstatic moments of identification with nature. There are convincing passages where the metamorphosis is outward—the heroine becomes a rock, a chair, a tree, experiencing these forms of existence in moments of identity. But there is an alternative rhythm where the self is invaded, and becomes the receptacle of external objects. In fact the heroine becomes succubus; not only her identity, but also the identity of the other is destroyed by her chameleon presence. To my mind comes the analogue of Keats' "Camelion Poet": "When I am in a room with People if I ever am free from speculating on creations of my own brain, then not myself goes home to myself: but the identity of every one in the room begins to press upon me that, I am in a very little time annihilated." To control this invasion an extraordinary exertion of will is necessary. For the poet, this means a control through technique, verbal dexterity. But P. K. Page's greatest dilemma is to ensure that this control is not sterile, that language is explored as experience, not evasion.

This, then, is the concern of the persona in "After Rain." With a baroque extravagance, the poet's mind builds from the visual assault of nature an exotic web of fragmentary images. They seem to metamorphose spontaneously and any attempt to hold the poet to an emotional or visual consistency is futile. Yet the incompleteness of the poet's private image world is focused suddenly by the presence of the other, the gardener. The poet is trapped by her remarkable responsiveness to nature. Images of rim and hub define the private space which circumscribes her, making her fantasy exclusive, self-involved. The poet asks to break from self-involvement to another kind of seeing, and this appeal is at the centre of Page's work…. Here is the paradox: a sensibility so richly susceptible to sensual detail, to "each bright glimpse of beauty," that even the sense of self, of separateness from the physical world, seems threatened. To the poet this means an almost unlimited store of image and metaphor, but without a controlling principle. Page recognizes the dilemma at the core of her imagistic suggestibility and she would be "unseduced" by the myriad images which seem to assault the eye in "After Rain." She has sensed the need to convert image into symbol, that painful ritual which the poet must impose on himself. She must seek a poetic order or rationale for the myriad details. The whole she seeks is another order of perception altogether, "larger than seeing." The eye becomes the most potent image in her work. It is through the visionary eye of the imagination that the marvelous involution takes place: from the multiplicity of sensual detail to the controlling principle of symbol: "The eye altering, alters all." (pp. 34-5)

[Page] began her poetic career with a reputation as a poet of social commitment and is probably still best known for the poems of the 1940's written while she was a member of the Montreal Preview group of poets. This is unfortunate because her "socialist" poems are, to my mind, her least successful. In fact few subjects could have done more to distract Page from her finest gifts. Like Wallace Stevens, she is almost entirely a poet of the imagination; her poetry has more to do with folklore, myth, and archetype than with objective time, history, and social fact. A fear of egocentricity may have led her to seek the supposed objectivity of the socialist theme, but it was a direction that led to a deep split at the core of those early poems. Many of the best of them describe the dilemmas of office girls, with an obviously genuine compassion. Yet even the good poems like "The Stenographers" are oddly unsatisfying because the poet's verbal facility betrays her. The attention she gives to metaphor distracts from the human dilemma that is her theme. (p. 35)

Many critics have been puzzled by the incipient terror under the smooth, urbane surface of the early poems, betrayed by the hallucinatory intensity of images like "the pool brims like a crying eye," or in poems such as "Some There Are Fearless" and "Element," a fantasy of escape in a dream of emersion into the anonymous dark. The cause of this pervasive sense of fear is unlocated in any specific way, but it does seem to be metaphysical in implication. One of the best of the early poems is "If It Were You," which describes the approach of madness and details the physical sensation of vertigo with terrifying precision. The poem's impact comes from the immediacy of the personal address and from throwaway lines like "If it were you … not me this time," which buckle against the tight control of the imagery. The experience described is one of entrapment in the blind circle of self with the mind held in "walls of air," "single and directionless in space." It is as if the spinning world of "After Rain" has suddenly solidified. (pp. 35-6)

Many have tried to account for the anguished sense of loss in the early poetry as a longing to return to the pristine innocence of childhood, but, of course, this is only a metaphor. Deeper at core is this reaching beyond to a larger reality, intuited in a poem like "If It Were You," and articulated with a growing assurance throughout her work. The discrepancy between the ideal world of the imagination, the potent world of dream, and the real world of the senses becomes one of her most obsessive subjects. Her finest early poem, "Stories of Snow," describes this with exquisite precision. It is one of those rare things, a perfect poem, in which language and metaphor have a compelling inevitability and rightness. The poem is a kind of parable. In countries of lush vegetation, the imagination seeks the opposite, the stark imagery of snow; as if the imagination, never satisfied with the real, must seek the fantasy, the ideal, impossible other. And any attempt to match the made to the sensed always falls short of the dream; the dreamer of snow is left with one of those bizzare glass globes enclosing a winter scene, familiar from eyeryone's childhood, now locked safely in a teakwood cabinet—a poignant image of the atrophied imagination. To lose the dream causes anguish; finding himself mistaken in his expectations that the dream has been actualized, the dreamer "lies back weeping." (pp. 36-7)

In an essay in Canadian Literature [Autumn, 1970], "Traveller, Conjuror, Journeyman," Page has frankly defined the "larger reality" she seeks as a mystic wholeness…. Only in moments of stillness, at-tension, is such a bouleversement of the normal world possible. The ideal condition is one of pure receptivity, inner silence. One thinks of Wordsworth's wise passiveness or Theodore Roethke's long-looking. Such silent patient waiting is an activity more potent than any searching. Thus Page's best poems always describe still moments of the psyche which reveal the mind in the act of transition to, as her finest poem would have it, another space. (pp. 38-9)

The final poem of Poems Selected and New, "Another Space," is P. K. Page's finest work. Its brilliance is a matter of perfect technical control. Its subject is a dream in which the poet sees a mandala: a personal vision of the archetype of the cosmic dance—the poet, a solitary viewer, is reeled into a human circle connected by an invisible axis to a starry spool. In such a poem, the poet must convince that she offers more than a formal arrangement of archetypal symbols. Page's poem convinces entirely; there is a feeling of recognition, a leap in response as if an elemental feeling larger than personal experience were tapped by the poem. Part of the achievement is a consequence of the rhythmical rightness of the poem. A precision in the use of line break catches the compulsive, hypnotic rhythm of the dream state. (pp. 40-1)

The oxymoronic quality of the dream is caught in the image "staggering lightness," as the dreamer is pulled into the archetype by the "blow of love." Throughout the poem Page has used traditional diction—circle, axis, fixed parts, rose—but in such a way that the private integrity of the experience is never invaded, and yet a recognizable structure is given to the whole. Traditionally, as in Sir John Davies' Orchestra or in the Divine Comedy, the controlling principle of the cosmic dance is Divine Love. Page convinces us that the breaking down of the isolation of the self in the dream state gives access to an overwhelming sense of numinous energy, and that to define the impulse behind this most profound reaching out beyond the limitations of the self, the only adequate word is love. (p. 41)