SOURCE: Curran, Beverley. “Swimming with the Words: Narrative Drift in Daphne Marlatt's Taken.” Canadian Literature 159 (winter 1998): 56-71.

In the following essay, Curran examines the shifting, “porous” interaction of language, narrative, and meaning in Marlatt's writing, particularly in Taken, contending this technique reflects Marlatt's preoccupation with the inseparable link between linguistic expression and bodily sensation and the malleable border between inner and outer worlds.

In her Foreword to Salvage, her last solo book of poetry, Daphne Marlatt described the process of writing those poems as “aquatic”:

working with subliminal currents in the movements of language, whose direction as “direction” only became apparent as i went with the drift, no matter how much flotsam seemed at first to be littering the page.

(n.p.)

In writing Salvage, Marlatt translated herself from reader to writer, returning to poems she had written in the early seventies and re-reading and writing them again...