A Whorl of Poetry

Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood has written at least the following books:

Poetry:

The Circle Game
The Animals in That Country
The Journals of Susanna Moodie
Procedures for Underground
Power Politics
You Are Happy
Selected Poems
Two-Headed Poems
True Stories
Interlunar
Selected Poems II
Murder in the Dark
Morning in the Burned House
Fiction:

The Edible Woman
Surfacing
Lady Oracle
Life Before Man
Bodily Harm
The Handmaid's Tale
Cat's Eye
The Robber Bride
Alias Grace
The Blind Assassin
Oryx and Crake
Short Fiction:

Dancing Girls
Bluebeard's Eggs
Wilderness Tips
Good Bones

Non-Fiction:

Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature
Days of the Rebels
Second Words
Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature

Most people know Margaret Atwood as a novelist, but I love her for her poetry. My favourite collection is True Stories (1981), with the magnificent "Variation on the word Sleep" (below) and "Small Poems for the Winter Solstice".

Free fall
is falling but at least it's
free. I don't even know
whether I jumped or was pushed,
but it hardly matters now
I'm up here. No wings
or net but for an instant
anyway there's a great
view: the sea,
a line of surf, brown cliffs
tufted with scrub, your upturned
face a white zero.
I wish I knew
whether you'll catch or watch.

-- From "Small Poems for the Winter Solstice," True Stories (1981), p. 28.
Links:

The Official Margaret Atwood Site, endorsed by MA & containing a wide variety of links, a complete bibliography, and so on.
The Margaret Atwood Society, an organization of academics who teach and study Atwood's writing.
A lovely article by Marilyn Snell for Mother Jones: Atwood talks politics.
On Writing Poetry -- hilarious & awesome lecture by Atwood on how she became a poet ("My English teacher from 1955, run to ground by some documentary crew trying to explain my life, said that in her class I had showed no particular promise. This was true. Until the descent of the giant thumb [that pressed down on her head and formed a poem], I showed no particular promise. I also showed no particular promise for some time afterwards, but I did not know this. A lot of being a poet consists of willed ignorance. If you woke up from your trance and realized the nature of the life-threatening and dignity-destroying precipice you were walking along, you would switch into actuarial sciences immediately.").
Some old Atwood audio clips from the BBC.

Other Atwood Poems Online

A Visit and Bored, published in The Atlantic [In Morning in the Burned House p. 88 and 91 respectively].

In the Secular Night, at a U of T Atwood site [Also in Morning in the Burned House p. 6].

Variations on the Word Love [True Stories p. 82], online at an Atwood fan site maintained by Josh, along with They Eat Out [Power Politics p. 5], and Postcard [True Stories p. 18].

Is/Not and More and More, online at the Atwood page of a great anthology of love poems.

All Bread, Christmas Carols [True Stories, p. 56], and Dreams of the Animals at Elizabeth Gerber's Handful of Poetry site.

At Jo's Poetry Index you will find the great poem Siren Song, along with Loneliness of the Military Historian [Morning in the Burned House p. 49], Marsh Languages [Morning in the Burned House p. 54], Song of the Fox, and Tricks with Mirrors. (Beware: the formatting is annoying and hard to read though.)

Spelling [True Stories, p. 63] is online at C. E. Clifford's site.

you fit into me
like a hook into an eye

a fish hook
an open eye.

-- From Power Politics (1971), p. 1.

Variation On the Word Sleep
I would like to watch you sleeping,
which may not happen.
I would like to watch you,
sleeping. I would like to sleep
with you, to enter
your sleep as its smooth dark wave
slides over my head

and walk with you through that lucent
wavering forest of bluegreen leaves
with its watery sun & three moons
towards the cave where you must descend,
towards your worst fear

I would like to give you the silver
branch, the small white flower, the one
word that will protect you
from the grief at the center
of your dream, from the grief
at the center I would like to follow
you up the long stairway
again & become
the boat that would row you back
carefully, a flame
in two cupped hands
to where your body lies
beside me, and as you enter
it as easily as breathing in

I would like to be the air
that inhabits you for a moment
only. I would like to be that unnoticed
& that necessary.

--From True Stories (1981), p. 86

This Is a Photograph of Me
It was taken some time ago.
At first it seems to be
a smeared
print: blurred lines and grey flecks
blended with the paper;
then, as you scan
it, you see in the left-hand corner
a thing that is like a branch: part of a tree
(balsam or spruce) emerging
and, to the right, halfway up
what ought to be a gentle
slope, a small frame house.

In the background there is a lake,
and beyond that, some low hills.

(The photograph was taken
the day after I drowned.
I am in the lake, in the center
of the picture, just under the surface.

It is difficult to say where
precisely, or to say
how large or small I am:
the effect of water
on light is a distortion

but if you look long enough,
eventually
you will be able to see me.)

Rain
It rains & rains & the trees
light up like stones underwater:
a haze of dull orange,
a yellow mist,
on the ground a purple kelp
of shed leaves.
The branches send out their tentacles:
catkins & red tufts
groping for summer.
From the window I can see
the meadow I walked through yesterday,
spiney mosses
in last year's papery grass, white flowers
tiny & chilly.

Here is a room
where you will never be;
outside, a road
where you will never
be with me. It's
hard to believe.
This is not a season
but a pause
between one future & another,
a day after a day,
a breathing space before death,
a breathing, the rain
throwing itself down out of the
bluegrey sky, clear joy.
-- From True Stories (1981), p. 89.