Rivering: The Poetry of Daphne Marlatt [Paperback]

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.Riveringincludes 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 intoRivering: lesbian love poetry fromTouch to my Tongue; a transformance of Nicole BrossardsMauve; passages fromThe Given, winner of the 2009 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize; a traditional Kuri song from the Noh drama,The Gull; and an unpublished excerpt from the chamber opera Shadow Catch.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 fromLiquidities: 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,Riveringis both a pocket Marlatt and an introduction to one of the best poets of our time.

Litter. wreckage. salvage is one of the first poems to signal Marlatts lifelong commitment to witnessing the stories of Steveston where, before the war, a Japanese-Canadian fishing community lived within the rhythms of salmon on the Fraser River delta. The poem also registers the young poets growing engagement with issues of gender and exploitation. These themes, as well as the theme of government-legislated dispossession in the wartime internment of Japanese-Canadians, continues through the Steveston poems Ghost and Slave of the canneries.Rivering openslq