The Given, Daphne Marlatt

Daphne Marlatt’s latest, The Given, is a book-length poem that explores the overlap between experience and memory.  Marlatt jumps around in time (from the 1950’s to the present) throughout the book’s five sections, which focus on Annie (the narrator) and her relationship with her mother.  The story is like a jigsaw puzzle that was once beautifully assembled, but has since been broken into pieces and jumbled; the fragments consist of Annie’s thoughts, her English mother’s letters and conversation, headlines from Vancouver newspapers, and advertisements for appliances and clothing.  Marlatt’s broken, yet cohesive lines effectively represent how memories, once recalled, are relived in “rapid overlay, one place-time on another, as if we’re actually in the movement between.”

In the opening of the poem, Annie is an adult (and mother), and her mother has died.  This death leads her to her childhood home, where she must parent her father and sort through her mother’s things; accordingly, Marlatt’s poetry gently but persistently examines the concepts of home, physicality, gender, and tragedy.  “[W]hat to do with the body,” Marlatt articulates, “her body impossibly there and not there...released from her story.”

Marlatt writes in stanzas of varying lengths, with lines that are not formally regular, in (unfortunately, somewhat erratically) varying fonts.  Much of The Given’s success seems to be due to the white space between the lines, which both fractures and splices the scenes and images.  It is difficult not to read this poem as an autobiography, thanks to Marlatt’s sincere, wistful tone.  Though much of the book is rooted in mourning, Marlatt does not sound depressed, remarking, “[S]ome days seem miraculous, this being in the midst of it all, this being at all.”  The Given is equal parts memorial and meditation to what is given, taken for granted, and inevitably taken away.