In “Unless the Eye Catch Fire,” the last and best story of P.K. Page’s A Kind of Fiction, an avid gardener and sometime journal writer is possessed by a strangely calm end-of-world vision that enables her to catch sight – without warning – of every colour within and beyond the range of the spectrum. She logs her enhanced vision with the simple observation that “one develops an eye for authenticity.” And yet, before she can even finish her thought, she again understands how these accounts are somehow “inarticulate, diffuse, unlikely, impossible.”

P.K. Page is also a painter and a poet, and over the years she has demonstrated the many ways an artist can render an account true. This type of vision in any craft can be quickly pooh-poohed, many seeing the celebration of “getting it right,” more specifically in fiction, as nostalgic, even archaic in a postmodern context. But trying to illuminate what was seen is at the centre of many of the stories collected here.

The protagonists lead quiet lives as they slip and turn inside their own perceptions, open and amazed at events and outcomes. At times Page’s characters seem so isolated within their thoughts that the reader may wonder if they should just get out more. But if the stories begin veering too deeply into the thoughtful interiors of the psychoanalytic, Page then opens up the narrative with nothing other than pure poetry. This happens more in the earlier works than in her recent stories.

Spanning some 50-odd years of Page’s career, A Kind of Fiction gives readers the opportunity to further explore the work of one of Canada’s premier poets, and is a perfect complement to the 1997 two-volume collection of Page’s poems, The Hidden Room.