Guyanese-born Canadian poet Janet Naidu will launch her new collection Sacred Silence at the Umana Yama on Monday at 5.30 pm.

Writer and Poet Janet Naidu

Janet was born in Covent Garden, East Bank Demerara and immigrated to Canada in 1975.

Her first collection of poems, Winged Heart (Greenheart, 1999), was shortlisted for the Guyana Prize for Literature in the poetry category in 2000. It is a collection of poems of love, power and ancestral memories set in Guyana and Canada. The weaving of the emotional connections is captured in layers of meaning that illuminate an understanding of migration, tragedy and resilience. The healing elements of human survival and continuity form a thread throughout the poems.

She has been published in the Guyana Journal and elsewhere.

Her second collection, Rainwater (Greenheart, 2005), deals with issues of migration, identity and struggle. There is a pervasive sense of love, despair, endurance, exile and settlement in all three of Janet’s collections as she conjures up events and scenes, as well as places in her memory, from Guyana and Canada.