SOURCE: Brand, Di. “The Absence at the Centre.” Canadian Forum 68, no. 779 (March 1989): 38, 40.

In the following review, Brand provides a favorable evaluation of Ana Historic.

Reading Daphne Marlatt is scary, she takes us so quickly, always, into the dark, the lost place, the unnamed and unnameable, below words, below the “real”: “Who's There? she was whispering, knock knock, in the dark.” Ana Historic pushes us back, through memory, through history, through old written records with their blatant omissions and concealments, through the throbbing pulse spots of old wounds, old fears, to the “gaping hole,” the “(blank blank),” the absence at the centre of our collective and individual being. What we find there is terror, wildness, the dark, but in and through it also, a beautiful, calm strength: gradually, we come to recognize the object of fear, the monster, as another aspect of the unnamed, untamed desiring self, the unknown...