Any biographical note on Daphne Marlatt seems especially slight because her published work gives so much of herself. Marlatt's reader will find not only the vital statistics, for example that her son Christopher Alan (Kit) was born 3 May 1969, but also the movements of her mind and body responding: the anticipation of pregnancy, the medical confirmation, the fears of miscarriage, the push to give birth. Marlatt's writing is an intimate autobiography, a life as it is being written, "a minute and painstaking examination," Frank Davey summarizes in From There to Here (1974), "of the processes of perception and of the moment-by-moment contents of consciousness." The aspiration behind Marlatt's painstaking, she writes in What Matters (1980), is phenomenology: "to catch the web of experience itself, not as thought (pursuit of an idea) which tends to shortcut sensory input, but the interplay of sensory being-in-a-place & thoughts about (connections with memory or surmise)."

Marlatt's...