Rivering: The Poetry of Daphne Marlatt

Opening doors, dreaming awake, tracing networks of music and meaning, Marlatt's 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 Brossard's 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, winner of the 2009 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize; a traditional "Kuri" song from the Noh drama, The Gull ; and an unpublished excerpt from the chamber opera "Shadow Catch."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 Marlatt's 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 Knutson's deeply attentive critical introduction and by Marlatt's "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.