Books by Daphne Marlatt

From one of Canadäs most influential poets, poems written in response to the discovery of letters by her father. These poems explore a sense of place and home on Canadäs West Coast now on the brink of global climate change. ¿There Then¿ permeates any ¿Here Now¿ of immigrant consciousness and highlights the impermanent quality of ¿home.¿

Opening doors, dreaming awake, tracing networks of music and meaning, Marlatts poetry stands out as an essential engagement with what matters to anyone writing with a social-environmental conscience. Rivering includes poems inspired by the village of Steveston where, before the war, a Japanese-Canadian community lived within the rhythms of salmon on the Fraser River delta. Also gathered into Rivering : lesbian love poetry from Touch to my Tongue ; a transformance of Nicole Brossards Mauve ; passages from The Given , winner of the 2009 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize; a traditional Kuri song from the Noh drama, The Gull ; and an unpublished excerpt from the chamber opera Shadow Catch. Difficult, beautiful, heart-breaking realities of the twenty-first century are urgently immediate in selections from Liquidities: Vancouver Poems Then and Now . All of the poems speak to Marlatts poetics of place and of language as passage between distant or disparate human beings, and between human beings and the more-than-human world. The selections are framed by Susan Knutsons deeply attentive critical introduction and by Marlatts immediacies of writing, a new lyrical essay investigating the act of writing. Closing with a walking meditation situated by her Buddhist practice, Rivering is both a pocket Marlatt and an introduction to one of the best poets of our time.