Hand Luggage: A Memoir in Verse

Griffin Prize Citation

'Elegant, rigorous, fresh, P.K. Page's work sings with a voice of independent character and maenad conjecture. It is a creature that lives on its own terms and terrain. It is startling, authoritative, and anti-sentimental, able to bear cool as well as passionate gazing at our own species. Her poems are always thinking -- each line is thinking, while its six senses remain impeccably alert. Her poems live by wit, wisdom, sass, suspense and a muscular lissome synapse and diction. They are daring in scope, meticulous in accomplishment, and boldly moral -- with a lovely flavour of amoral verve! We fall under the charm of her reasoning, of her fecund, fastidious imagination, of her many musics, and of her necessariness to us, her essentialness.'

Globe and Mail

'P. K. Page shares with her 17th-century predecessors, such as John Donne, a refusal to separate head and heart. What you hear in her work is the sound of intelligence brought crisply into focus.'

— Robert Enright

Malahat Review

'Historically, people undertaking to write autobiographies have expressed the need to excuse themselves for their presumption. Augustine frames his memoir as a confession to God, though it is uttered within the hearing of a mortal audience. Rousseau finds his own existence so exceptional that, on the grounds of uniqueness, he exempts himself from the charge of self-absorption. Thoreau explains that he wants to confront the essential facts of life, an undertaking best pursued in solitude -- at least, the literary solitude furnished by use of the first person singular. P. K. Page need supply no apology for her memoir in verse, Hand Luggage. A major poet, her first significant publication dating from 1944, P. K. Page's sheer avidity for existence on earth offers abundant reason for an account of her life.'

— Eric Miller

Globe and Mail - Robert Enright

'P. K. Page shares with her 17th-century predecessors, such as John Donne, a refusal to separate head and heart. What you hear in her work is the sound of intelligence brought crisply into focus.'

Malahat Review - Eric Miller

'Historically, people undertaking to write autobiographies have expressed the need to excuse themselves for their presumption. Augustine frames his memoir as a confession to God, though it is uttered within the hearing of a mortal audience. Rousseau finds his own existence so exceptional that, on the grounds of uniqueness, he exempts himself from the charge of self-absorption. Thoreau explains that he wants to confront the essential facts of life, an undertaking best pursued in solitude -- at least, the literary solitude furnished by use of the first person singular. P. K. Page need supply no apology for her memoir in verse, Hand Luggage. A major poet, her first significant publication dating from 1944, P. K. Page's sheer avidity for existence on earth offers abundant reason for an account of her life.'