Description
An early member of the avant-garde TISH group, which turned Canadian poetry for the first time to a focus on language, Marlatt’s career has spanned five decades and a range of formal styles and concerns. Intertidal: The Collected Earlier Poems offers Marlatt’s perceptual and Vancouver-centric work of the 1970s, her feminist writing of the 1980s, and her later collaborative work. Intertidal collects a broad selection of this poet’s groundbreaking work, including poetry from sixteen published collections and a number of previously unpublished or uncollected poems. The volume contains:
Frames of a Story (1968)
leaf leaf/s (1969)
What Matters: Writing (1968–1970)
Vancouver Poems (1972)
Our Lives (1972–1975)
Steveston (1974)
“Month of Hungry Ghosts” (1979)
“A Lost Book” (1970s)
“Here and There” (1981)
How Hug a Stone (1983)
Touch to My Tongue (1984)
Salvage (1991)
“small print” (1993)
“Sea Shining Between,” “Impossible Portraiture,” “Tracing the Cut” (2002)
“Generation, generations ...” (Coda to the 3rd edition of Steveston, 2001)
Between Brush Strokes (2008)
The later chapbook, Between Brush Strokes, is reproduced in full-colour, facsimile edition. The collection includes an introduction by Susan Holbrook as well as a complete bibliography of the work of this West Coast, deconstructionist, lesbian, and feminist writer. Intertidal is the definitive oeuvre of Daphne Marlatt’s poetry exploring the city, feminism, and collaboration.
This is the third volume in a new series of collected works published by Talonbooks. The first two are Peacock Blue: The Collected Poems of Phyllis Webb and Scree: The Collected Early Poems of Fred Wah, 1962–1991.
Contributor Notes
Daphne Marlatt was at the centre of the West Coast poetry movement of the 1960s, studying at the University of British Columbia and with many of Donald Allen’s New American Poets, most notably Robert Creeley and Robert Duncan. Her early literary associations with the loosely affiliated Tish group encouraged her non-conformist approach to language and form. Her unique disposition toward language shapes and is shaped by her commitment to exploring and honouring silenced histories and experiences. For her, writing has been a lifelong ethical project, deeply engaged with feminism, immigrant experiences, and ecological issues. Her innovations in the prose poem form have influenced an entire generation (and beyond) of Canadian poets.
Susan Holbrook, editor of this collection, is also a poet, a professor at the University of Windsor, and a pre-eminent critic of Marlatt’s work.
Editorial Reviews
“It offers another way to think of what lies (and what matters) between one state of being and another, between Marlatt’s past and her present, and between her sense of history and the undeniable present of her writing.”
—Canadian Literature
“Reading Intertidal offers evidence of what can be repurposed and re-seen, of what can be, in Marlatt’s words, not the wreckage of history but poetry’s conscious recuperation via challenge of location and form: to be 'in her element in other words. blurring the boundary.'”—Canadian Literature
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“The collection results from both a commitment to collaboration, and an enduring engagement with the natural world and the gendered body, which fundamentally informs the author’s entanglements with feminist ecopoetics.”—Lemonhound
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“If a reader is coming to these texts for the first time, or if reading is a Re(Vision) of Marlatt’s poems, there is equal reward.”—Malahat Review
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"Distinctive, eclectic, and remarkable."—Nicholas Bradley, BC BookWorld
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