Daphne Marlatt’s latest book of poems is a memory book—an album of love poems spanning twenty-five years, from her first writing of what was to become the opening section, “A Lost Book,” to later, most recent sequences.
These are love poems in the sense that in the meeting of our minds and bodies, we are actually tied to the earth, and how, with its turns and tremors, the world displays us, its lovers, dispassionately in all our tenuous and fleeting splendour: in the pull of desire, the ecstasy of union, the angst of loss and identity, the deterioration of recognition and affection.
A studied master of her craft, Marlatt weaves her motifs of departures and arrivals, the recurrence of wounds and loss, and the delight in what surrounds us and how we are drawn to reconnect with it time and again in an astonishing variety of notation, ranging from the prose poem to the spare image afloat on the glaring sea of the page.