Dearly [electronic resource] : New Poems

Title:

Author:

Description:

-- The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments, Oryx and Crake, among others—she has, from the beginning of her career, been one of our most significant contemporary poets. And she is one of the very few writers equally accomplished in fiction and poetry. This collection is a stunning achievement that will be appreciated by fans of her novels and poetry readers alike.

Publisher:

HarperCollins,

Date:

2020

Digital Format:

CLOUDLIBRARY EPUB

Language:

English

Summary

A new book of poetry from internationally acclaimed, award-winning and bestselling author Margaret Atwood

In Dearly, Margaret Atwood's first collection of poetry in over a decade, Atwood addresses themes such as love, loss, the passage of time, the nature of nature and - zombies. Her new poetry is introspective and personal in tone, but wide-ranging in topic. In poem after poem, she casts her unique imagination and unyielding, observant eye over the landscape of a life carefully and intuitively lived.

While many are familiar with Margaret Atwood's fiction--including her groundbreaking and bestselling novels The Handmaid's Tale, The Testaments, Oryx and Crake, among others--she has, from the beginning of her career, been one of our most significant contemporary poets. And she is one of the very few writers equally accomplished in fiction and poetry. This collection is a stunning achievement that will be appreciated by fans of her novels and poetry readers alike.

Reviews (4)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Atwood (The Testaments) returns with a sardonic and sagacious masterpiece to add to her significant oeuvre. Fantasy, love, sex, feminism, and mortality are explored with discursive poise and narrative cohesion. Atwood has a knack for creating piquant emotional textures, infusing ideas, experiences, and objects with palpable life, as when she envisions the negative space that will remain after the death of her partner: "That's who is waiting for me:/ an invisible man/ defined by a dotted line:// the shape of an absence/ in your place at the table,// ...a rustling of the fallen leaves,/ a slight thickening of the air." Time is perhaps the most ubiquitous variable in her poems; Atwood fuses past and present, resulting in prescient nostalgia for the current moment and for the future. But there is hope here, too, in spaces created by voids. In "If There Were No Emptiness," she writes: "That room has been static for me so long:/ an emptiness a void a silence/ containing an unheard story/ ready for me to unlock.// Let there be plot." Combining dignified vulnerability, lyrical whimsy, and staunch realism, Atwood offers a memorable collection that emboldens readers to welcome disillusionment. (Nov.)

Guardian Review

Margaret Atwood does not do nostalgia. This collection of poems, her first in over 10 years, is a reckoning with the past that comes from a place of wisdom and control. Now 81, she harnesses the experience of a lifetime to assume a wry distance from her subjects - as if, in an astounding world, nothing could throw her off balance. This mastery, even at her most subversively fantastical, is part of what makes her an outstanding novelist. But poetry is different. Atwood is an undeceived poet and, even though the collection is full of pleasures, reading her work makes one consider the extent to which poetry is not only about truth but about the importance of being, at times, mercifully deceived - what Robert Lowell dubbed the "sanity of self-deception". The title poem is about words threatened with extinction. It's an old word, fading now: Dearly did I wish. Dearly did I long for: I loved him dearly. I was surprised she feels "dearly" and "sorrow" have fallen into disuse, although that "reft" is endangered (Sad Utensils) is uncontroversial. The words are paraded like missing persons. About actual missing people, she is more private. The book is dedicated to Atwood's partner, Graeme Gibson, who died in 2019, after a struggle with dementia. At the end of his life, he was like the vanishing word: "fading now, I miss you". Other poems are about him, too. In Invisible Man - a spare, withheld poem - his presence is bravely envisaged as absence, "like hanging a hat/on a hook that's not there any longer". Her poems take on global subjects too. In Aflame she bleakly asserts that humanity is compelled by conflagration: "They end in flames/because that's what we want¿" And she does not flinch from a bald address about climate crisis in Oh Children: Oh children, will you grow up in a world without birds? Will there be crickets, where you are? Will there be asters? Clams, at a minimum. Maybe not clams. She cannot resist a joke. The slighter poems are the most successful. You can almost hear her speaking voice, see the twinkle in her eye. The wonderfully observed Ghost Cat is about an old cat who suffers from dementia "losing what might have been her mind". The feral is never far off (there are wolves, werewolves and mushrooms bringing news from underground). And souvenirs abound. Her poem about the old passports we inexplicably save is particularly entertaining. She marvels (as many of us do) at the ¿procession of wraiths' photos claiming to prove that I was me: the faces greyish disks, the fisheyes trapped in the noonhour flashflare with the sullen jacklit stare of a woman who's just been arrested. And she concludes that a woman is "cursed if she smiles or cries". Her championing (and, sometimes, criticism) of women continues unabated. There is a playful fantasy (Cassandra Considers Declining the Gift) about Cassandra skipping doom to become an uneventful matron with a "dark-blue leather purse". And in Princess Clothing, she writes with militant impatience about the false weight given to what women wear. Silk is for shrouds, she writes, and ends: It's what you hope too, right? That beyond death, there's flight? After the shrouding, up you'll rise, delicate wings and all. Oh honey, it won't be like that. Not quite. Undeceived as ever. Elsewhere, she quotes Rilke: "Poetry is the past that breaks out in our hearts." She seems to wish she could rise above recollection and comically likens the arrival of a poem (in Zombie) to an inconvenient revenant: "The hand on your shoulder. The almost-hand:/Poetry, coming to claim you." o Dearly by Margaret Atwood is published by Chatto & Windus (£14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply SAD UTENSILS The pen reft of the hand, the knife ditto. The cello reft of the bow. The word reft of the speaker and vice versa. The word reft: who says that any more? Yet it was honed, like all words, in the mouths of hundreds, of thousands, rolled like a soundstone over and over, sharpened by the now dead until it reached this form: reft reft a cloth ripped asunder. Asunder - minor sunset, peach clouds faded to slate: another loss. And what to do with these binoculars, sixty years old or more, reft of their war?

Booklist Review

Atwood's first books were poetry collections; decades later, she infuses her newest poems with the flinty wit and surefire lucidity readers cherish in her best-selling, influential fiction, including The Testaments (2019). Spiked with surprising juxtapositions and wily delight in language, at times mordant, frequently hilarious, and always unflinching, Atwood's poems are rooted in nature, with spotlights on spiders, cicadas, and slug sex. Droll spoofs on werewolves, the Wizard of Oz, and movies about aliens offer incisive contrasts between reality and the imagination, while romantic sentiments are decisively detonated. Birds are ever-present, tragically so when they crash into our bright night windows. With a cascade of environmental concerns in mind, the poet asks: "Oh children, will you grow up in a world without birds?" Naming our era the Plasticene, Atwood decries the plague of plastic destroying our oceans. Contrasting our deep past with our reckless present, she muses: "Everything once had a soul." The loss of a loved one, the ravages of age, and stark generational changes prompt Atwood, as the collection's title suggests, to embrace her "dearly beloved" and call on us to hold all of life dearly.

Library Journal Review

Elegiac yet cautionary, Atwood's first new collection since 2007's The Door revolves around themes of mortality, environmental jeopardy, memory, feminism, and loss. These carefully tuned lyric poems, many lightly rhymed, often bear bitter witness to humankind's self-destructive treatment of both planet ("Whatever we touch turns red") and spirit ("we don't have minds/ as such these days, but tiny snarls/ of firefly neural pathways/ signalling no/yes/no"). A lifelong activist, Atwood nicknames our geologic age The Plasticine, characterized by a civilization "spewing out mountains of whatnot," filling oceans with a "neo-seaweed/ of torn bags, cast wrappers, tangled rope/ shredded by tides and rocks." The final section of poems, haunted by "the shape of an absence," are poignant with the memory of novelist Graeme Gibson, her partner for nearly a half-century who passed in 2019. VERDICT Atwood's flare for precise metaphor in no way softens her delivery, as when she observes "We are a dying symphony." Combining the wit of Dorothy Parker with the wisdom of Emily Dickinson, Atwood adds a steely grace and richness all her own. If there is beauty in despair, one may find it here.--Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY