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of this poet’s groundbreaking work, including poetry from sixteen published collections and a number of previously unpublished or uncollected poems.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.

Daphne Marlatt was born in Melbourne in 1941 and spent much of her childhood in Malaysia before emigrating to Canada in 1951. 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. Much of her postmodernist writing would be attuned to the adjustments, struggles, and accomplishments of immigrants. While Marlatt attended UBC (1960–1964), her literary associations with the loosely affiliated Tish group encouraged her non-conformist approach to language and etymological explorations.She was a co-founding editor of two literary magazines: periodics and Tessera. She co-edited West Coast Review, Island, Capilano Review, and TISH. In 2004 she was appointed as the first writer-in-residence at Simon Fraser University in three decades. She directed the Fiction stream of the Banff Writing Studio from 2010 – 2012.Her early writing includes prose narratives on the Strathcona neighborhood of Vancouver and of the former Japanese-Canadian fishing village of Steveston, and several poetry books. Selected Writing: Network is a collection of her prose and poetry, published in 1980. More of her writing can be found in The New Long Poem Anthology: 2nd Edition (2000), edited by Sharon Thesen. Daphne Marlatt’s This Tremor Love Is (2001) 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, more recent sequences.Marlatt has been a featured poet on the Heart of a Poet series, produced in conjunction with Bravo! TV. Her recent work includes The Gull, the first Canadian play staged in the ancient, ritualized tradition of Japanese noh theatre, and winner of the prestigious 2008 Uchimura Naoya Prize.In 2006, Marlatt was appointed to the Order of Canada in recognition of a lifetime of distinguished service to Canadian culture. In 2009, she was awarded the Dorothy Livesay Prize for Poetry, for her innovative long poem The Given, and in 2012 she received the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award.

Daphne Marlatt's profile page

Susan Holbrook’s poetry books are Ink Earl (Coach House 2021), Throaty Wipes (Coach House 2016), Joy Is So Exhausting (Coach House 2009), and misled (Red Deer 1999). Her most recent publication is Canon (Zed 2022), a chapbook featuring great works of literature translated through a calculator. She has also written a textbook, How to Read (and Write About) Poetry (Broadview Press 2021), and edited Intertidal: Daphne Marlatt--The Collected Earlier Poems (Talonbooks) and The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson: Composition as Conversation (Oxford UP). Her work has been nominated for numerous awards, including the Governor General's Award, the Trillium Book Award, the Trillium Award for Poetry, and the Pat Lowther Award. She teaches Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Windsor. She lives in Leamington, Ontario.

Susan Holbrook's profile page

“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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