SOURCE: "The Beautiful Page," in The Canadian Forum, Vol. LXII, No. 718, May, 1982, pp. 32–3.

Below, Mandel reviews Evening Dance of the Grey Flies. She comments that the "accomplishment of this fine book, much waited for, is that it makes such elegantly crafted artifacts beautiful to an eye more usually drawn to the mere complexities of spawning daily flux."

The "fragile, slender-winged" grey flies in the title poem of P. K. Page's latest collection are dancing in the evening light of a sun which gilds and transforms nearly every other thing in the book. It transforms Victorian gardens into Brazils and jewelled legends, motel pools into Edens, it shines in brushed hair and in the "stainless steel" wrist of Mstislav Rostropovich, sees itself doubled in the gaze of sunflowers and in the "myriad-faceted eye" of the poet. The light in Page's poems comes from both the sun's eye and the...