Then Now

de Daphne Marlatt

"Then Now was prompted by the discovery of letters written by Marlatt's father, Arthur Buckle, a young chartered accountant who left England to join a British accounting firm in multiracial Penang in the early 1930s and continued living, working, as well as marrying there until going on leave in 1941. A sense of looming war begins to permeate his letters. When her family returned to Penang post-war, Marlatt spent almost five years of her childhood there. Her father's letters prompted the surfacing of memories overlaid by later ones from several adult returns, so she began writing poems in response to excerpts from his letters, writing from a sense of place and home on Canada's West Coast now on the brink of global climate change. Throughout, "There Then" permeates any "Here Now" of immigrant consciousness and highlights the impermanent quality of "home.""--