A memory of Brazil and its natural beauty evokes calm, and a strange benediction, as poet P. K. Page recalls (for example) two coloured birds which alight on her husband, Arthur, at dusk, in Rio de Janeiro. Page’s three years in Brazil, from 1957 to 1959, retain this luminous, slightly surreal quality in the poet’s memory, ‘baroque’ she once called its landscape and culture.
‘How could I have imagined so surrealist and seductive a world? One does not like the heat, yet its constancy, its all-surroundingness, is as fascinating as the smell of musk. Every moment is slow, as if under warm greenish water....’
In 1957, Page moved to Brazil with her husband, the Canadian ambassador. The hot, lush landscape was utterly immersive -- and for the next three years Page recorded her life in an intimate, vibrant, startlingly funny journal. Between her at times theatric responsibilities as the wife of an ambassador, and her futile attempts to organize the ambassador’s palatial home and staff, Page found the time to write in exquisite prose of her responses to the wildlife, the people and the colours of Brazil, in the end illuminating more of her own emotional and artistic journey than of the country itself. Accompanied by several of the illustrations Page created while on her travels, this is a fascinating, beautiful account of life in a magically unfamiliar place.
Brazilian Journal is the second addition to a series of volumes to be published over the next ten years as a complement to an online hypermedia edition of the Collected Works of P.K. Page. The online edition is intended for scholarly research, while this new edition offers a beautiful text to be enjoyed by those who love and wonder at the talent of one of Canada’s greatest poets.