‘While we are still in the budding of youth understanding and purity shine before our eyes; absolute truths rise to prominence within ourselves, the feeling we have about everything in the world is that of eternity. We are light and live in infinite light. Then suddenly death strikes at us; an arcane and, usually, unexpected visitor who comes in order to ‘take away’. And then a new world opens up within ourselves. The ‘thenceforward world’. This is the world that the young Maria Lainas attempted to chart in her collection Thenceforward and to take pictures of some of its nooks and crannies. While holding onto her primeval poetical device, her hand trembles with excitement, her soul a very flow of pain, a cry of anguish for the return of the shufflers of this mortal coil. Part of Lainas’ achievement is that she did not lose herself in the flood of words that surrounded her, but rather, with a composed technique, attempted to form out of these words a synthesis in four parts. She absolutely refused to be drawn into the use of readymade poetical expressions, devised by others, in order to render in verse her bitter experiences of death. The substrata of her youthful poetry seem to contain minerals all their own. Her feeling for life has her in thrall and led her into writing some very excellent verses…’