Spending the year with new(ish) books by friends, locals, and other Canadian poets old and new. Follow along daily on BlueSky and Instagram.

This week’s post is about a book it took me two weeks to read, slowly. P.K. Page’s “The Hidden Room” was one of those books I discovered in University and so formed part of my early existence as a writer. I took many lessons from this book. It had been probably ten years or more since I last read this so I took really took my time and savoured it.

This post is about age, I think. All of the poems I remember loving were still in the book but, to varying degrees, they hit differently. For instance, I have very clear memory from the first time I read ‘Finches Feeding’ of obsessing over the image of birds being “like feathered cones.” This time around, the uncertain middle of the poem struck me more: “Having said that, what Have I said? / Not much.” There were more than one similar instances of this shift. Some lines, however, hit just the same. “The sun has beaten its palms flat against glass” from ‘Bed-Sitting Room” is still as powerful an image as it ever was.

Another feature of this book, and of poetry from the mid-century and earlier, that I hadn’t thought about for years was the non-use of pronouns in certain situations. The most clear example from my two weeks of posts comes from ‘Average’: “These fishes take their own trip, scrape / sun from wave’s underside with fin.’ Not with “their” or “its” fin. Just fin. This is a construction I don’t think I’ve seen in a new poem in ages. Something about ditching the pronoun here opens the image just wide enough for the reader to slip into scale, and later, ride our own single blade. To become fish.

Let that sink in. Read these poems. Let them all sink in.

This is what drove my creativity these past two weeks. I became, among other things, Fish: