Marya Fiamengo is one of Canada's truly fine poets. For nearly four decades, she has been publishing poetry of unusual distinctiveness. Intelligent, richly evocative, formidable in its clarity, lyrical and yet austere, the voice in Fiamengo's poems is like no other in Canadian poetry.

White Linen Remembered, her seventh collection, expresses her concern for the continued vitality of the individual, and does so, paradoxically, within an elegiac frame. Invoking the power of art to console and heal in the face of the inevitables of human loss, Fiamengo meditates on the origins of personal identity and, ultimately, the imponderables of the devine

Marya Fiamengo was born in 1926 in Vancouver, BC, the child of immigrants from the Croatian island of Vis. Complementing her Slavic roots is Fiamengo’s love for the English language. She earned a Master’s degree in English and Creative Writing from University of British Columbia under the direction of Earle Birney and Dorothy Livesay. She then taught in the English Department at UBC from 1962 to 1993, publishing seven volumes of poetry as well as numerous critical reviews and essays. Since the early 1970s, she has been a passionate advocate of Canadian cultural and national autonomy. She now lives in Gibsons, BC.

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