Canadian poetry felt its way into modernism hesitantly over a prolonged transition period which stretched from the 1920s to the 1940s. These two decades produced a number of poets who, though not great talents, contributed to the change. One was Floris Clark McLaren.

McLaren, the daughter of Henry Clark, a farmer and horticulturist, and Marion Granger Clark, was born Floris Marion Clark in Skagway, Alaska, in 1904. After attending the public school in Skagway and the normal school at Western Washington University in Bellingham, she taught in Skagway from 1923 to 1925, the year of her marriage to John Angus McLaren. From 1925 to 1932 the McLarens lived in Whitehorse, in the Yukon, where their sons, John Angus, Jr., and Bruce Alan, were born. In 1932 the family moved to Victoria, British Columbia; McLaren remained there until her death in 1978.

In 1937 Macmillan published Frozen Fire, McLaren's first and only book. The poetry in it...