Peripatetic Poet

When poet and painter P.K. Page (1916–2010) appeared in “full evening dress” at a diplomatic reception in Mexico City that she herself had partly engineered for Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, she was 43—and had not written a poem in three years. Although poetry had been her ambition, her joy, her sustenance since she was a toddler whose mother made her drawings into little books, the dislocated Page would not reclaim the power of her literary voice for four more years, with her return to her home country. Distinguished biographer Sandra Djwa tracks the vicissitudes of the creative and personal life of the talented, privileged, outwardly sturdy and elegant, inwardly delicate and searching Patricia Kathleen Page in Journey with No Maps: A Life of P.K. Page. She “was a new type,” Djwa says, “not a suffragette, not a twenties flapper, but a modern woman in embryo,” someone Alice Munro so revered that she could not believe “that this person was flesh and...