This Tremor Love Is

Thomas M.F. Gerry is a professor of English at Laurentian University and
the editor of Arachne, Laurentian University’s bilingual
interdisciplinary journal of language and literature.

This collection includes new poems and revisions of previously published
poems. Whatever the histories of the book’s constituents—and people
no doubt will have lots of fun examining the revisions—This Tremor
Love Is arranges Marlatt’s poems as themes and variations involving
love. Although three of the book’s six sections are dedicated to
particular people, the impression that the whole book gives is less of a
series of love poems than of an extended meditation on numerous ways
that human beings connect with one another and with their worlds. Even
the loss of a relationship, the missing of another, is for Marlatt a
sign of connection. People are prominent in Marlatt’s worlds, of
course. She is also particularly fascinated by words, their sounds and
etymologies; by writers and their writings; by the energy of poems and
their power to create connections.

Marlatt’s language is always exact, beyond expectation. Her poems
offer the pleasing sense that there is much more to them than one can
experience with a single reading. And the book as a whole fulfils the
promise of the poems. After reading it, the reader—something like
bringing binoculars into focus, or two instruments into tune—has a
perception of what it’s like (for Marlatt) to connect.

“Tremor”: shaking or quivering caused by excitement, weakness,
fear. To tremble is a physical action, yet it is not active; it is
passive. Poplar leaves in a breeze. Action caused by the unseen.
Marlatt’s stance as a poet is precisely at this point of
active/passive balance. She is wise with the knowledge, in her words, of
“how to pay a fine attention praising simply & correctly the fleeting
phases of what is.”