Coal and Roses
by P.K. Page
Erin, ON: The Porcupine's Quill, 2009, ISBN 978-0-88984-314-1, 96 pp., $16.95 paper.

Page dedicates Coal and Roses "To you, my readers, whoever you be." In the twenty-one glosas that follow, Page demonstrates her skill as a poet who can expand with wit and verve on many themes while following the difficult form of the glosa in which, as outlined in a prefatory note, the four lines of a borrowed quatrain from another poet are used to terminate each of her own four ten-line stanzas. In this more challenging form, the sixth and the ninth lines must rhyme with the borrowed lines, and, of course, the poet's work must measure up to or exceed that of the poet on whose poem she builds her own.

Following all these intricate requirements while intertwining her own verses with the borrowed lines, Page begins with Robert Penn Warren's poem "Treasure Hunt" to create her own poem, "The Search," and ends with Anna Akhmatova's apocalyptic "Everything is Plundered" to write a triple glosa using three different quatrains from that poem to provide the scaffolding for her own title sequence.

Page works to integrate these disparate poets and poems with her interests as a poet, and various motifs, including roses and the colour yellow, variations on green and sometimes blue recur in several poems. (Fittingly, the cover design displays an image of "yellow roses" and coals that may be associated with roses.) Juan Ramón Jiménez's "Yellow Spring," about the beauty of spring at once celebrated and lamented in an atmosphere of foreboding, inspires Page's "Ah, the Golden Lilies":

I barefoot in the petals
trample a yellow world
while small canaries flutter
over the lotus pond.
I trail my golden fingers--
for I am Midas' daughter--
in the tepid, golden water. (28)

As "Midas' daughter," whose father transforms all to inedible gold, the speaker in Page's poem sees her existence as an artist in the context of a world of satiety and vague discontent wherein art is beautiful but lacks something. Although the speaker invokes the name of Jiménez as inspiration that promises to free her from the superficial "golden clangour" with ranting "blue and gold macaw" and sensual but perhaps vapid "cassia-coloured sun" to reach a more transcendent poetry, she soberly notes that Jiménez's roses "denote a falling sound" that will not rhyme even with the similarly spelled "jocosos" (on account of its variant rising stress on the last syllable).

In "Blue Guitar" named the same as the Wallace Stevens poem on which it is based, Page expounds on another preoccupation as a poet and artist, namely the nature of perception and the transforming power of art:

I do my best to tell it true
a thing exceeding hard to do
or tell it slant as Emily
advises in her poetry,
and, colour blind, how can I know
if green is blue or cinnabar. (36)

Not only is perception necessarily subjective, but the act of transforming subject matter into art may also be seen to alter that material. As Stevens points out, "The things I play are better far/ when changed upon the blue guitar," and Page justifies this transformation since "the literal is rarely true/ for truth is old and truth is new," but "I play the truth of Everyman/ I play the truth as best I can" (37). With this lively rejoinder, Page draws a conclusion based on Stevens's more languorous lines but with no less truth.

Page further explores the artist's pursuit in "My Chosen Landscape," which uses as a point of departure Gwendolyn MacEwen's "Finally Left in the Landscape." While MacEwen looks for an essential form that inheres in matter, "a form that dances in the sand," Page looks less idealistically for an escape from the mundane:

Restless in all this emptiness, I seek
a fellow traveller, search for a sign--
a secret handshake, a phrase, some unusual colour
like periwinkle, for instance, or bright citrine,
but the monotony of sand persists
and nothing improbable finds entry
into the appalling platitudes of speech--
the lingua franca of everyone I meet-- (60)

Paradoxically, Page revels in this "violated country's" almost "scentlessness, this sand without a shape," and so we are reminded that, as a transplanted Englishwoman, Page perhaps finds herself simultaneously excited by the amorphous nature of the unformed country (and, by extension, chaotic modernity) and discouraged by its shapelessness.

In "Your Slightest Look," Page sets her style against a poem using one very different from her own, e.e. cummings's lyrical "somewhere I have never traveled, gladly beyond." Between cummings's poetically phrased "you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens" and "(touching skillfully, mysteriously) her first rose," however, Page manages to reach towards interesting truths from unforeseen angles. And consider the covert personal love poem implicit in the following eloquent lines:

I do not know the chemistry of bodies
yet know no other hands, and/or no lips,
which can so capably and quite uncurl me
outward, you-ward, into your embrace. (35)

Similarly, with a pained eloquence that betrays a depth of understanding, Page touches on the nature of fear in developing "No Exit," composed around lines from Theodore Roetke's "In a Dark Time":

There is no other universe than this.
Nor heaven above it. This is terminal.
Poor soul, poor weary soul--point three three three
recurring endlessly. Monotony
fuels its tiny motor. Half asleep
it still asserts itself, I, I, I, I, (69)

In this way, Page's verses meld with Roethke's image of the fly beating against the window sill while it merges in that poet's next line with the "fallen man" or lost soul who must "climb out of [his] fear." While Roethke's voice is in the first person and romantic in its intrinsically subjective and limited view, Page's assumes a more distanced perspective on the human plight in a material universe in which even infinity must be measured by the never-ending decimal point of pi.

In the final title sequence, the triple glosa "Coal and Roses," Page expands on preoccupations that tormented Anna Akhmatova, whose world fell apart with the rise of the Bolsheviks in Communist Russia. While themes of apocalypse enter into the first glosa, including such social problems as homelessness, unemployment, drug-using among youth and environmental concerns such as global warming and the disappearance of the polar bear, the second glosa more optimistically opens with a suggestion of hope and spring, progressing to summer with the Perseides of August and the infinite possibilities of an infinite universe. Finally, the third glosa embraces a "place" where the image of "coal and roses"--with its associations with transcendence and love--may be considered (in association with fuel and beauty) a gift to humanity: a salvation at the end of the world for a population dwelling in "ruined, dirty houses." Generous and far-ranging though these final glosa are, the verses seem more ponderous and less winged than some of the earlier glosas, though they close this many-textured collection on an altruistic note.

Not only did I enjoy the teasers from past poets, I also found Page's verses intelligent, witty, wise, and, on occasion, lyrically inspired as they struck some personal note with the referenced poet. Page's decision to build on poets who came before her would support T.S. Eliot's conception of the artist's role as expressed in "Tradition and the Individual Talent," as well as Leonard Cohen's later derived concept of a "Tower of Song."

Gillian Harding-Russell lives, reviews, edits, teaches and writes in Regina. Her latest collection of poetry is I forgot to tell you (Thistledown Press, 2007).

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