Coal and Roses

`A Companion to the Order of Canada, one of Canada's highest civilian awards, PK Page brings her excellent expertise to the table with Coal and Roses. An exploration of language using the concept of Glosas, she discusses poetry by channeling sources of many other famous poets to execute her work, staying true to the original while getting her message across with fine technique. ``On a Far Shore'': It is summer, early evening / stars beginning / no dog barking. / The morning star / promises daylight, / and the moon is full. / Yet darkness fights for itself. / It has its methods, / is infinitely resourceful. / The night unravels its blue wool.'

James Cox, Midwest Book Review

`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.'

Gillian Harding-Russell, Prairie Fire