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Steveston
A collection of poetry and photographs that reinvents the little village of Steveston, close to Vancouver, Canada -- a fishing village populated at one time by mostly Japanese fishermen and their wives. Splendid b&w photographs of the Fraser River, the canneries and the people of Steveston
Paperback
Published January 1, 1984
36 people want to read
About the author
Daphne Marlatt
53 books12 followers"Nationality: Canadian (originally Maylasian, immigrated to Canada in 1951). Born: Daphne Shirley Buckle, Melbourne, Australia, 1942.
Education: University of British Columbia, Vancouver, 1960-64, B.A.; University of Indiana, Bloomington, 1964-67, M.A. 1968. Career: Has taught at University of British Columbia, University of Victoria, University of Saskatchewan, University of Western Ontario, Simon Fraser University, University of Calgary, Mount Royal College, University of Alberta, McMaster University, University of Manitoba; second vice chair of the Writers' Union of Canada, 1987-88.
Awards: MacMillan and Brissenden award for creative writing; Canada Council award. Member: Founding member of West Coast Women and Words Society.
Other Work:
Plays
Radio Plays:
Steveston, 1976.
Other
Zócalo. Toronto, Coach House, 1977.
Readings from the Labyrinth. Edmonton, Alberta, NeWest Press, 1998.
Editor, Lost Language: Selected Poems of Maxine Gadd. Toronto, Coach House Press, 1982.
Editor, Telling It: Women and Language Across Cultures. Vancouver, Press Gang, 1990.
Editor, Mothertalk: Life Stories of Mary Kiyoshi Kiyooka. Edmonton, Alberta, NeWest Press, 1997.
Translator, Mauve, by Nicole Brossard. Montreal, Nouvelle Barre du Jour/Writing, 1985.
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The National Library of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario.
Critical Studies:
Translation A to Z: Notes on Daphne Marlatt's "Ana Historic" by Pamela Banting, Edmonton, NeWest Press, 1991; "I Quote Myself"; or, A Map of Mrs. Reading: Re-siting "Women's Place" in "Anna Historic" by Manina Jones, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1993; The Country of Her Own Body: Ana Historic, by Frank Davey, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1993.
"Although I think of myself as a poet first, I began writing both fiction and lyric poems in the early 1960s. My collections of poetry have usually had a loose narrative shape as I tend to write in sequences, or "books." As an immigrant, I'd long held the ambition to write an historical novel about Vancouver, but Ana Historic actually critiqued and broke open the genre, as it also increased my fascination with the potential for openness in the novel form. Influenced by the development of "fiction/theory" in Quebec by feminist writers there, I see open structures combined with a folding or echoing of women's experiences in different time periods as a way to convey more of the unwritten or culturally overwritten aspects of what it means to be alive as a woman today.'"
* * *
Read more: "Daphne Marlatt Biography - Daphne Marlatt comments:" - http://biography.jrank.org/pages/4556...
Education: University of British Columbia, Vancouver, 1960-64, B.A.; University of Indiana, Bloomington, 1964-67, M.A. 1968. Career: Has taught at University of British Columbia, University of Victoria, University of Saskatchewan, University of Western Ontario, Simon Fraser University, University of Calgary, Mount Royal College, University of Alberta, McMaster University, University of Manitoba; second vice chair of the Writers' Union of Canada, 1987-88.
Awards: MacMillan and Brissenden award for creative writing; Canada Council award. Member: Founding member of West Coast Women and Words Society.
Other Work:
Plays
Radio Plays:
Steveston, 1976.
Other
Zócalo. Toronto, Coach House, 1977.
Readings from the Labyrinth. Edmonton, Alberta, NeWest Press, 1998.
Editor, Lost Language: Selected Poems of Maxine Gadd. Toronto, Coach House Press, 1982.
Editor, Telling It: Women and Language Across Cultures. Vancouver, Press Gang, 1990.
Editor, Mothertalk: Life Stories of Mary Kiyoshi Kiyooka. Edmonton, Alberta, NeWest Press, 1997.
Translator, Mauve, by Nicole Brossard. Montreal, Nouvelle Barre du Jour/Writing, 1985.
*
The National Library of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario.
Critical Studies:
Translation A to Z: Notes on Daphne Marlatt's "Ana Historic" by Pamela Banting, Edmonton, NeWest Press, 1991; "I Quote Myself"; or, A Map of Mrs. Reading: Re-siting "Women's Place" in "Anna Historic" by Manina Jones, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1993; The Country of Her Own Body: Ana Historic, by Frank Davey, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1993.
"Although I think of myself as a poet first, I began writing both fiction and lyric poems in the early 1960s. My collections of poetry have usually had a loose narrative shape as I tend to write in sequences, or "books." As an immigrant, I'd long held the ambition to write an historical novel about Vancouver, but Ana Historic actually critiqued and broke open the genre, as it also increased my fascination with the potential for openness in the novel form. Influenced by the development of "fiction/theory" in Quebec by feminist writers there, I see open structures combined with a folding or echoing of women's experiences in different time periods as a way to convey more of the unwritten or culturally overwritten aspects of what it means to be alive as a woman today.'"
* * *
Read more: "Daphne Marlatt Biography - Daphne Marlatt comments:" - http://biography.jrank.org/pages/4556...
Ratings & Reviews
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
April 20, 2020
[13/166]
If you like really dense poems about fish, Steveston is right up your alley. Stylistic flourishes such as (open parentheses (that don't (end and constant detours to detail are common across the poems, creating a sense of cohesion and flow that carry its identity as a collection. Steveston can be challenging for the same reasons I found it worthwhile--often those details create prose so thick that it could be cut with a knife, slow-moving pools of words turning into rivers of poetry thick with grit and verisimilitude.
If you like really dense poems about fish, Steveston is right up your alley. Stylistic flourishes such as (open parentheses (that don't (end and constant detours to detail are common across the poems, creating a sense of cohesion and flow that carry its identity as a collection. Steveston can be challenging for the same reasons I found it worthwhile--often those details create prose so thick that it could be cut with a knife, slow-moving pools of words turning into rivers of poetry thick with grit and verisimilitude.
June 20, 2024
The poetry in this book was such a slog to get through. The photos are nice and whatever and i’m glad i looked at them earlier on because they do help to get an image of what the hell the poetry is even referring to. I didn’t read this book with a bookmark and every time i opened the book up again I would end up re-reading a poem before getting to the end and realizing I had already read that one because they were all so forgettable (except for the two that were mostly just dialogue of overheard conversations). Basically the poetry is just the words water, ocean, fish, boat, net, salmon, shack, Japanese, Chinese, river, *insert sexual innuendo here*, and spawn over and over again. The worst part was definitely the punctuation though - commas, half-brackets, dashes, colone, and semicolons just streen around wherever in a random manner that just totally breaks up the manner and interrupts any connections to meaning. My edition has a poem written decades later added to the collection where the author has dropped this bad habit because clearly it wasn’t working. Hopefully my prof in July can help explain why this book is at all acclaimed, because it seems pretty extractive of the Steveston community and broader Japanese-Canadian community to me.
April 16, 2025
Really beautiful book. It reads like a montage documentary, capturing the history, lives and energies of Stevenson, a Japanese-Canadian fishing town during the 70s. Incredibly human and spectral at once. The collection deals with aftermath of the relocation of mass amounts of Japanese-Canadians during WW2 and Canadian’s colonial history and how these events shape everyday mundane life in Canada’s small towns. I found myself flipping through the photographs between poems and I personally feel like these two sections of the book are meant to be experienced together rather than separately. My one critique is that at times some of the themes and ideas were repetitive or drawn out.
March 2, 2023
A number of poems from this collection were required reading for an ecopoetry course I am taking, and I enjoyed it so much I decided to read the whole thing! Although I am new to open-field poetics and struggled with the process while reading, the language and imagery was striking. Coming from a part of Canada that historically relies on forestry and tourism, Steveston exposed me to life in a fishing village for Japanese Canadians on the West Coast.
There is so much I could say, we spent an entire class on the first four stanzas of just "Steveston as you find it:", but to be brief Steveston is a beautiful and worthwhile read for anyone interested in delving into ecopoetry.
There is so much I could say, we spent an entire class on the first four stanzas of just "Steveston as you find it:", but to be brief Steveston is a beautiful and worthwhile read for anyone interested in delving into ecopoetry.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews