P.K. Page is a visionary, a descendant of Blake and the alchemist writers. She makes this connection herself in "Request to the Alchemist":

I am a tin whistle
Blow through me
Blow through me
And make my tin
Gold

Like Blake, Page is also an accomplished visual artist and would subscribe to his conviction that "We are led to Believe a Lie/ When we see not Thro' the Eye." This is the eye that can see beyond habitual perception, the eye with the power to rend what D. H. Lawrence called the "great umbrella between mankind and.Titans in the wild air." That is why Page quotes Theodore Roszak: "Unless the eye catch fire/ The God will not be seen."
Page's poems are spattered with delphinium blue, Van Gogh yellow, and garden green, but I am certain that a word count would confirm the preponderance of gold. There is the poem "Three Gold Fish" with its allusion to Blake's "Tyger", the "gold calligraphy" of grey flies in sunlight, and "Aurum", with its artist's "sparks" of gold leaf. Gold is the colour of transformation, of turning dross into the extraordinary. In the telling poem "A Backwards Journey", Page describes her childhood habit of staring at a can of Dutch Cleanser on whose label "a smaller Dutch Cleanser woman/ was holding a smaller Dutch Cleanser can." And so on, the images repeating themselves in diminishing size until the child believes "that tiny image/ could smash the atom of space and time." The key to this poem is the word "Cleanser", which is repeated seven times. Blake wrote, "If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite."
The mystical and transcendental are fundamental to Page's sensibility. Yet when she is most obviously a visionary, her poetry is least effective. The "gold smiles" of her angels are unconvincing; her golden seraphim are too assured to create the tension on which poetry thrives. She becomes successful when her vision is acted out in natural settings using less "poetic" symbolism, and when the visionary world is counterpoised with the humdrum, banal, or violent. In an effective poem like "The Bands & the Beautiful Children", music and the imagination are set against the reality of "straggling grass" and "men tired and grumbling". In her best poems she goes beyond such dualities. "Stories of Snow" tells of those living in a world of "great flowers.with reds and blues" who dream of a world of whiteness, hunters, and death. What makes this poem remarkable, aside from its dream-inducing cadence and its paradoxical rhymes, is the irony that the white, violent terrain is also gentle, mystical, and as beautiful as the lush, colourful one. This blurring of the typical dichotomies gives the poem a layered depth, a metaphysical aura. Page here is describing the killing of a swan:

.hunters plunge their fingers in its down
deep as a drift, and dive their hands
up to the neck of the wrist
in that warm metamorphosis of snow
as gentle as the sort that woodsmen know
who, lost in the white circle, fall at last
and dream their way to death.

Page's "office" poems ("The Stenographers", "Typists", "Shipbuilding Office", etc.) are amongst her most perfectly realized. More sculpted than painted, these poems have a sense of weight and durability. They show the influence of Klein's The Rocking Chair: there is the same exuberant language, surprising syntax, assertive use of metaphor and simile. In one poem, the signing of an office petition has the following results:

Friends were unfrocked;
girls who had held
each other's hands like lovers.
drew apart like knives.

Enemies released
the tight cord of dislike.

These poems are rooted in this world; they attempt to capture a social or- as in "Bank Strike"-political climate, while at the same time delineating spiritual states. The office can become a hell, as in "The Petition", or a heaven, as in "Presentation", where gratitude made public results in ascension:

Now most miraculously the most junior clerk
becomes a hero.
Oh, beautiful child
projected suddenly to executive grandeur,
gone up like an angel in the air of good wishes,
the gift and the speeches.

The publication of a poet's collected work is an important occasion and The Porcupine's Quill deserves praise for producing an attractive two-volume set enhanced by the inclusion of Page's intriguing art work. A serious error, however, was made in the structuring of the collection. Page's editor has divided the book into thematic sections: Night Garden, Generation, A Dome of Tears, etc. This reminds me of those editions of Emily Dickinson in which the poems are divided under the headings, Love, Nature, Eternity, except that here the titles are more sophisticated. The only proper way to organize a poet's collected work is chronologically. Presenting poems in order of their creation allows for an appreciation of the poet's development as artist and personality. The essential biography will be found in that progression. In a chronological ordering the reader is allowed to enjoy the discovery of thematic links between the poems and to speculate why certain concerns crop up at different periods in the poet's career. The organization of these collected poems gives us one individual's reading of P. K. Page; that is appropriate for a review but unwelcome in a major undertaking of this sort.
As I read through the two volumes, I was more and more struck by Page's perception of male and female identities, which has occasioned some of her most arresting work. I am thinking of such poems as "In Class We Create Ourselves", "Vegetable Island", "Young Girls", "Portrait", and the exquisite "After Rain". When I speak of male and female identity, I do not mean anything as superficial as gender politics, but rather Page's ability to harness, through her imagery and rhythms, male and female energies and her desire to balance them. In the poems that explore sexuality, Page moves from Blake to the modern visionary: D. H. Lawrence.
In "Vegetable Island", "women wander unafraid as if/ they made the petals" in a garden "lush and lovely", while a man

.must strip and throw his body
into the acid ocean to erase
the touch and scent of flowers.

In "After Rain", a garden marred by snails becomes the province of women:

The snails have made a garden of green lace:
broderie anglaise from the cabbages,
Chantilly from the choux-fleurs, tiny veils-
I see already that I lift the blind
upon a woman's wardrobe of the mind.

The last two lines, with wonderful wit, employ the Marvell-like couplet, calling to mind another poet's garden. I say "wit" because Marvell's slightly misogynist poem tells of "that happy Garden-state/ While man there walked without a mate." In "After Rain", a male figure, Giovanni, will enter; the ruining of the garden has disturbed him. Page wishes him to see beauty in the snail's destructiveness; also, she wishes something of the male for herself and asks to be "unseduced by each/ bright glimpse of beauty.." In all of these poems, Page displays an uncanny awareness of the strengths and weaknesses inherent in masculinity and femininity. That knowledge opens us to the possibilities of sharing certain characteristics, or at least being sensitive to their presence.
Page has been likened to Elizabeth Bishop, but the similarities are superficial. They are women of the same generation; both lived in Brazil and painted watercolours. But while Bishop deals more with the minutiae of everyday existence, building toward the visionary slowly and cautiously through a detailed description of her immediate surroundings, Page tends to use faster and more radical means to get at the transcendental realm and is more confident of its presence. Bishop, possibly a more accessible poet, employs language that is colloquial, and a tone that is conversational. Anthony Hecht called her style "Shaker plainness". Page's language is often unusual, daring, sensuous; her style can be complicated. While this combination of diction and style occasionally gives rise to obscurity, it more often results in the marvellous complexity of poems like "After Rain", "T-Bar", and "The Stenographers".
Page's voice is not personal, yet "Voyager", which conveys the heartbreak of a daughter who never knew her father, makes us wish Page had written more such poems. Likewise, the psychological acuity displayed in "Marmots", "Water & Marble", and "Contagion" suggests that a greater number of poems could have been written in that vein. But enough. It is best with poetry to give thanks for what we do have: a significant body of work that includes a half dozen major poems and a number of short lyrics ("A Part", "This Heavy Craft", "Death", "On Educating the Natives") that are amongst the best our country can offer.
I will conclude with one of these. Bear in mind that the word verse comes from the Latin vertere-to turn. Poetry is that which asks us to turn and look again. In that light, we may read "Stefan" as a definition of the art itself:

Stefan
aged eleven
looked at the baby and said
When it thinks it must be pure thought
because he hasn't any words yet
and we
proud parents
admiring friends
who had looked at the baby
looked at the baby again

 Kenneth Sherman's most recent book of poems is Clusters (Mosaic), reviewed here in December.