Brazilian journal - Softcover

Page, P.K.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0886191807 ISBN 13: 9780886191801

Publisher: L. & O. Dennys, 1987

Synopsis

By Governor General Award-winning poet P.K. Page, Brazilian Journal is a fascinating, funny and beautifully written insider`s view of life and travel in a rare and distant land.

About this title

About the Author

P. K. Page wrote some of the best poems published in Canada over the last five decades. In addition to winning the Governor General's Award for poetry in 1957, she was appointed a Companion of the Order of Canada in 1999. She was the author of more than a dozen books, including ten volumes of poetry, a novel, short stories, eight books for children, and a memoir, entitled Brazilian Journal, based on her extended stay in Brazil with her husband Arthur Irwin, who served as the Canadian A

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It is hot. Siesta still.
Not hot enough for Brazil but I think of Brazil
and the small yellow bird that flew in and perched
on the toe of Arthur's crossed-over foot,
puffed out its feathers, settled down for the night;
and the hummingbird, ruby-throated, a glowing coal
with the noise of a jet
that landed cool and light on the crown of his head.
-- P. K. Page, `Domestic Poem for a Summer Afternoon' (1977)

A memory of Brazil and its natural beauty evokes calm, and a strange benediction, as Page recalls two coloured birds which light on her husband, Arthur, at dusk, in Brazil. 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. Page travels to Brazil, but the country equally travels with her throughout her poetic career, whatever emotional, intellectual or aesthetic guise her recollections may assume. She often refers to this period in later interviews and in essays like `Questions and Images,' in which she famously asks, `I wonder now if ``brazil'' would have happened wherever I was?' (188). At this point, ten years after her departure from Brazil, Page is still thinking about her struggle to write poetry at that time: `Blank page after blank page. The thing I had feared most of all had happened at last' (188). As she reconstructs the experience in her essay, the very `thisness' of Brazil in its sensuous immediacy returns to her: `What was that tiny fret, that wordless dizzying vibration, the whole molecular dance? What was that golden shimmer, the bright pink shine on the anturias, the delicately and exactly drawn design of the macaw's feathers?' Out of this mute encounter with her environment in Brazil, `each tile of each house, each leaf of each tree, each blade of grass, each mote of sunlight,' she begins to draw `as if my life depended on it' (188).

Brazilian Journal is Page's edited version of a series of journals she kept in the 1950s and 60s, and the only substantial travel narrative published during her lifetime. Both the public and private Brazilian journals are extraordinary documents. They are marked by intense sense-based descriptions of natural environments, encounters with individual Brazilians and with cultural practices like the powerful and disturbing macumba ceremony. The time Page spends in Brazil and her many journeys within the country mark a turning point in her career. For reasons which aren't fully explained in the published journal, Page experiences mood-swings during this period and finds herself largely unable to write poetry. Unexpectedly, she discovers a passion for painting -- and Page becomes as prolific an artist as she is poet and essayist.

Page was forty-one when she arrived in Brazil in early 1957. She had met and married journalist and diplomat Arthur Irwin in 1950, when Irwin left Maclean's to become Commissioner of the National Film Board of Canada, where Page worked as a scriptwriter. Irwin was posted to Australia in 1953 and, following the posting to Brazil in 1957, to Mexico and Guatemala in 1960. Irwin, the `A.' of Brazilian Journal, had been the driving force behind the ascendancy of Maclean's magazine, which he had begun working for as an associate editor in 1925 and of which he became editor in 1945, recruiting a raft of talented writers, from Pierre Berton and June Callwood, to Sydney Katz and Clyde Gilmour. Page was well-grounded in her career when she met Irwin, and found a highly supportive and thoughtful life-partner in him: `He gave me full freedom to do my thing, and a safe and sheltered place to do it from.'

Page arrived in Brazil at an interesting moment in its history, as Brazil was being positioned by politicians and its artists as a country of the future and as distinctively modern. Modernismo in the literary and visual arts was well-established by this time, several decades after the Semana de Arte Moderna of 1922, the festival which is traditionally seen as marking the emergence of Brazilian modernism. In a present-day context in which modernism is being reconfigured in global terms, with attention to its meanings and manifestations in non-European and American contexts, the encounter of this Canadian writer with Brazil and with Brazilian culture is particularly important. The act of travel itself, as Denise Heaps argues, `entails the crossing of linguistic, paralinguistic, and cultural boundaries in addition to geographical and political ones' (359). As a traveller, Page crosses geographical boundaries, from Australia, to New Guinea, to Brazil and later Mexico. She crosses the boundaries circumscribing gender roles, for while she per

About this edition

• Publisher: L. & O. Dennys
• Publication date: 1987
• ISBN 10: 0886191807
• ISBN 13: 9780886191801
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 241