Poetry
The Metal and the Flower
P. K. Page · 1954
Synopsis
A slim collection of sixty-four pages, published in a poetry series in Toronto. The poem that gives it its title makes barbed wire and rose grow together, in a garden that figures a love in which what wounds grows alongside what flowers. Childhood, love and dream, subjects that critics note for the poems of these years, stand alongside images of glass, salt, snow and sea, in which sleep turns into drowning.
Context
The second collection by its author, after a first published in 1946, it was published in Toronto in 1954 by McClelland and Stewart, in the Indian File series, some twelve years after her debut in Preview, a magazine founded in Montreal in 1942; she had by then been in Australia since 1953. She then published very little poetry for nearly ten years, and her next collection did not appear until 1967.
Who it is for
A short collection of brief, dense poems; the difficulty lies in the imagery, not in the syntax.
Prizes and reception
Governor General's Award for poetry for 1954; its author was still publishing books in her nineties.
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