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Hand Luggage, P.K. Page's autobiographical long poem, chronicles the long and varied life of one of Canada's best loved and most decorated poets. Born in 1916, Page has reached the vantage of age and, despite her mild self-deprecation, she has attained considerable insight into her personal history and the histories of the various countries that she and her diplomat husband have called home. Her account of life in Australia, Brazil and the USA, where she associated with prominent politicians, writers and artists, will engage even those readers unfamiliar with her painting and writing.

As we might expect from a contemporary poet, she participates in the discourse of post-modern historiography, stating early on, "what was clearly consecutive no longer is. / Chronology's merely a temporal squint" (section IV), but she does not let such existential qualms undermine her project. Instead, she plies between past, present and future with freedom, while still maintaining the integrity of individual anecdotes. In other words, Hand Luggage offers coherent insights into her experience while remaining true to her mental processes (as far as we can tell).

The form of the poem, not to mention its conversational tone and its content, echoes that other famous verse Künstlerroman, William Wordsworth's The Prelude (published 1850). Like Wordsworth, Page chronicles her growth as an artist in a long poem divided into sections (twelve in her case), with a set meter. In Hand Luggage, Page acknowledges her interest in Wordsworth, even mentioning her visit to his famous Lake District home. Indeed, her comments on youth as a time when "feeling was thinking" (section I) recall Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality" and "Tintern Abbey." Moreover, when she compares memory to "a river that rushes, dries out, / and is quickened by freshets" (section VI), she echoes Wordsworth's famous conceit comparing the "surface of past time" to that of a still river (The Prelude, Book Fourth).

The similarities end, however, with Page's versification. Throughout this long poem she skillfully employs a four-beat, accentual meter - an unobtrusive, fluid prosody that recalls Old English poetry and that of Gerard Manley Hopkins. This meter, combined with her playful use of the pun, alliteration, internal rhyme and other rhetorical figures, allows Page to elevate what is sometimes mundane content, as when she writes, "I was crazy for colour. I crayoned a lot" (section III). This example of an alliterative, four beat line complete with caesura is triply reminiscent of Old English verse.

Weaknesses in the poem are few, as when Page's penchant for alliteration reaches ponderous proportions; for example, she panegyrizes "freshets and freakish flash floods" (section VI). There are also a few philosophical statements in the book that seem facile: "Surely, we're one - / all peoples" (section VI), or clichéed: "I write this today as the world falls apart" (section XII). Thankfully, though, the poet qualifies these statements with humility and frank self-awareness: "One weeps for oneself, I suppose. And I wept" (section VI).

In general, Page balances her more lyric passages with others containing either light word-play or matter-of-fact details in order to avoid unqualified Romanticism and ponderousness. But perhaps the most refreshing aspect of Hand Luggage is the poet's refusal to succumb to cynicism; in spite of living through two world wars and the moral slippage concomitant with the ascendancy of global capitalism, Page ends her memoir on a note of bittersweetness. The human heart, she writes, "almost sings through its grief like a bird - water bird -" (section XII), and she reminds us that the poet is called to embrace life in its totality, perhaps not wishing for death and suffering, but accepting them and mitigating their sting through art.