Then Now

Then Nowis a book about memory, family, catastrophe, immigration, and colonialism prompted by the discovery of letters written by Marlatt's father, Arthur Buckle. Buckle, a young chartered accountant, left England in the early 1930s to join a British accounting firm in multiracial Penang, Malaysia, where he continued living and working, as well as marrying, until going on leave in 1941. Throughout his time in Penang, he wrote regular letters "home." As the years progress, a sense of looming war begins to permeate them. The Buckle family returned to Penang postwar, and Marlatt spent almost five years of her childhood there. Reading her father's letters decades after their composition prompted the surfacing of memories overlaid by later ones from several adult returns, and she began writing poems in response to excerpts from the 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." (From Talonbooks)