Planet Earth

by P.K. Page

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.' This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0889842523
• ISBN13: 9780889842526
• Release Date: August 2002
• Publisher: Porcupine's Quill
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 0.79 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.6" x 8.8"

Customer Reviews

Cherishing Planet Earth

If you are familiar with P.K. Page's poetry, you will cherish this collection. If you don't yet know her work, this is the place to start. Planet Earth, Eric Ormsby's selection of Page's poems written over five decades, presents Page's work in an arrangement that is as elegant and esoteric as the poet herself. Ormsby must have found it a challenge to have to choose from Page's considerable body of work. In his introduction he acknowledges that the choice was hard, and says that he was "guided by that instinct of vitality which emanates from all her finest work." His clustering of the poems is neither chronological nor thematic, but in these seven sections, bracketed by a single poem at the beginning and the end, there is an energy, a vitality, that flows with the sure shimmer that lights up her best poems. And all the poems here are her best -- although it may not be the case that all her best poems are here, for there are so many of those. The collection is sufficient, though, to demonstrate that she is, as Ormsby claims, "one of the finest and most distinctive Canadian poets . . . a citizen not merely of the world, but of the earth."Few recent poems have been so widely read or to so much applause as "Planet Earth," the title and opening poem. Chosen by the United Nations in 2000 to be read on Mount Everest and in Antarctica for the Year of Dialogue among Civilizations, this poem has been read before countless conferences, special events, and graduation ceremonies at which listeners were exhorted to "love this planet, as a laundress loves her linen." It will continue to be read, and readers everywhere will always want to comply with her directive. Page's poetry makes us dream of a better world in which we would love the planet as she does; "Journey," the collection's concluding poem, urges us not to resist the dream, reminding us that "the stop is limbo." Here is a book full of vision, wisdom and hope. Here is a poet who should be loved and celebrated in just the way that her poems celebrate our planet. She has to be crowned and renowned, known and admired,loved and lauded. This book must be toted and touted, and read and re-read. Silently, loudly. Again and again.