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The following is excerpted from The Gazette review of Journey with No Maps: A Life of P.K. Page by Sandra Djwa.
In her later years, Page personally chose Djwa, now a professor emeritus at Simon Fraser University, to serve as her biographer, which provided Djwa with privileged access to the poet, her inner circle and her archives, both during Page’s lifetime and since. Djwa meticulously traces Page’s artistic evolution and early influences, particularly in her close reading of Page’s journals, and for this reason Journey With No Maps should provide a valuable resource to Page scholars and enthusiasts for decades to come.
Djwa’s story of Page’s life is oriented around three distinct narratives. In the first, Page is a precocious child of a military father and an artistic mother who has grown up in various locations across Canada and who, ultimately, arrives in Montreal during the Second World War. It’s in Montreal that she connects with the group editing the seminal Canadian modernist magazine, Preview. The Preview group also included such literary giants as A.M. Klein, Patrick Anderson and the constitutional lawyer/poet F.R. Scott. Although Scott is married, he and Page begin a romantic relationship that persists for many years and that, as Djwa illustrates, inspires Page’s early poetic development. It should come as no surprise that Djwa has a profound insight into the Page-Scott relationship; in 1987, she published the biography The Politics of the Imagination: A Life of F.R. Scott.
(…)
Ultimately, the portrait of Page provided in Journey With No Maps is one of paradoxes and contradictions. Page lived most of her adult life geographically removed from the Canadian literary mainstream, and yet she still managed to inspire and mentor generations of younger Canadian poets. She was a completely modern 20th-century woman who also managed to play the antiquated role of a diplomat’s wife for several decades. She was thoroughly independent and yet got mired in the role of F.R. Scott’s mistress. She achieved celebrity both as a poet and painter, but somehow managed to keep these two identities almost completely separate. Early in her career, she wrote political poetry in a lyrical era and, later, she wrote lyrical poetry in a political era.
Somehow, Page made this collection of contradictions work; each juxtaposition seems to have stimulated her artistic evolution and determination. What remains is a body of work that will endure for generations.
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