White Linen Remembered

Lynn Szabo is an assistant professor of English at Trinity Western
University in Langley, B.C.

In her seventh poetry collection, West Coast poet Marya Fiamengo invokes
the power of art to console in the face of loss. In one brief section,
the poet dedicates her elegies to dead friends and finds consolation in
the fact that “[e]verywhere the stains of the / eternal seep into
corners.” Fiamengo’s poems are rich with biblical allusions and
deeply informed by her Yugoslavian roots. Her stylistic preference is
for the short, intense line.

At one point, the poet wonders if language can “change the harsh
disorder of the real,” and then proceeds to demonstrate the ways in
which language does precisely that. Like her friend Joseph Plaskett whom
she eulogizes, Marya Fiamengo is clearly a “committed citizen of the
imagination.”