O Canada!

Marketers toil, hoping to instill “brand loyalty” so you buy only Gulden’s Brown Mustard. I adhere to brand loyalty only when it comes to writers – in this case, Eric Ormsby. I would read and probably buy anything he wrote or recommended, which is the reason I have been reading Planet Earth, a selection of poems written by P.K. Page and edited by Ormsby. I had never before heard of Page (the P.K. stands for Patricia Kathleen), in part because she is Canadian and the permeable membrane between our two countries, at least in terms of literature, tends to flow one way (north, despite the firm of Atwood, Gallant, Munro, Davies and Cohen). Page was born in 1916, making her a contemporary of such American poets as Lowell, Berryman and Bishop, but the poet she most reminds me of, at least after a brief acquaintance, is the Australian, Les Murray, though her language is richer and her sensibility less pugnacious. Here’s an excerpt from “Poem Canzonic with Love to AMK” that reads like a credo:

“It is the writer’s duty to describe
freely, exactly. Nothing less will do.
Just as the painter must, from two make three
or conjure light, build pigments layer on layer
to form an artefact, so I must probe
with measuring mind and eye to mix a blue
mainly composed of air.
What is my purpose? This I cannot say
Unless, that I may somehow, anyhow
Chronicle and compare
Each least nuance and inconsistency.”

In his “Foreward,” Ormsby tells us Page is also a painter, which accounts not only for the reference to fashioning pigments but also for the acute, painstaking visual sense: “to mix a blue/mainly composed of air.” I like Page’s balance of exuberance and care. There’s nothing dry or academic in her lines, but neither do they reek of avant-garde posturing. Ormsby suggests that Page “should be read and savoured, with all the senses, with the tips of the fingers and the surfaces of the skin, with that utmost attentiveness earth itself demands from us.” She never mistakes emotion for truth. She has no sermons to preach, no ulterior politics, only poetry, and she throws us in medias res:

“I have coming here since I was born
never at my will
only when it permits me

“Like the Bodleian like the Web
like Borges’ aleph
it embodies all

“It is in a house
deeply hidden in my head
It is mine and notmine

“yet if I seek it
it recedes
down corridors of ether

Each single version
Is like and unlike
all the others

“a hidden place
in cellar or attic
matrix of evil and good

“a room
disguised as a non-room
a secret place

“I am showing it to you
fearful you may not
guess its importance

“that you will see only
a lumber room
a child’s bolt-hole

“Will not know it as prism
a magic square
the number nine”

This teasingly suggestive poem is titled “The Hidden Room,” and seems to be Page’s way of addressing the mysterious source of poetry itself, “mine and notmine.” I intend to read more deeply in Page, buying the two volumes of her collected poems. She turns 90 in November, which I trust will be celebrated in Canada as a national holiday. She reminds us that poetry can be celebratory, exciting, affirming and worthy of our trust, like a dependable friend. This is poetry for grownups, but not drudges.

And for another rousing dose of Ormsby, check out Page P8 of this weekend’s edition of The Wall Street Journal. Ostensibly, Ormsby reviews Fighting Windmills, by Manuel Duran and Fay R. Rogg, but he doesn’t much care for the volume so he uses the opportunity to share his enthusiasm for Don Quixote, which he calls “the greatest novel in European literature.” The review appears not to be available online.