A Whorl of Poetry

Index of Authors

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.