WHITE LINEN REMEMBERED, by Marya Fiamengo, Published by Ronsdale Press, 3350 West 21st Avenue, Vancouver, B.C. V6S 1G7, pp 80, price
There is a picture on the back of White Linen Remembered of Marya Fiamengo herself, and it caused me a pang right away. She looks like my aunt Ruby. Not that this implies any kinship, but, for all its illogic, it rattled me. I could only think of tea in her parlor, and molasses cookies, fruitcake at Christmas. And so i approached the first poem with a sort of trepidation about whether my critical eye would be hampered by my Aunt Ruby and her words, most of them aunt-ish, and none of them poetic.
Marya Fiamengo‘s words won, hands down. After two sentences i was out of Aunt Ruby’s apartment, and into the poetry that flows easily from Fiamengo’s pen.
White Linen Remembered is divided into sections numbered from I to VII and the slim book is easily digested in one sitting. Fiamengo uses striking images (Deep in the hectic/ red of ripening berries) and a lively vocabulary in short lines and verses to take you away from yourself and your indoor space. Though her poems are like fine lace, they are of lasting strength, and speak of things exterior. You could use them on a cloud or spread them against the green of a summer meadow.
"…the dark girl stitches ancient
needlework.
Pregnant she sits at ancient patterns
by the aspen tree dreaming
Her needle a compass point
accepts the truth of promise."
(From Healing Oblivion, section I )
When you spend time with her work, her poetic intelligence reminds you of the beauty of this art form, however constrained by politeness. Her titles and the epigraphs above many of her poems, seem a little ostentatious compared to the lean calm of much of her verse. It is both old fashioned and boring to name drop with such frequency, when the poems themselves need no external endorsements. A bit of this ostentation creeps into the poems collected into part VII, the last section of the book. But even here where she is more abstract in both subject and image, she has great lines:
"Watch the cellist
His arm a wing
of grace notes
sweeps the circumference
of radiance
the radicals of treble."
(From The Taste of Silence, section VII )
White Linen Remembered is dusty with facial powder and antimacassars. It suffers a gentility we do not often read in contemporary Canadian poetry. But it is a comfortable dust and a comforting gentility, surrounding solid craft and lines of great beauty.
allison comeau
Have you seen the writing on the
wall
Managing Editor:
b stephen harding,
Consulting Editor: Seymour Mayne,
Art Consultant: Kane Faucher
Guest Editor: Stephanie
Bolster
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