Waiting Poem By Margaret Atwood

Morning in the Burned Firm: New Poems by Margaret Atwood, 136 pages, ISBN: 0771008309 Postal service Your Opinion

Knowing that Survives by Charlene Diehl-Jones THE TITLE OF MARGARET ATWOOD'Due south new volume of poems, Morning in the Burned House, catches the nuances of her project here: these poems chart possibility in a world marked past difficulty and loss; morn requires -- and rewards -- the effort of re-vision. Atwood is drawn to potent expressions of diverse subjective experiences of the world: we get, as we read, the lone military machine historian who wears sensible suits in eleven unalarming shades of biscuit" to assuage people's anxiety about her unfeminine profession ("The Loneliness of the War machine Historian"); nosotros listen to the explanations of Helen of Troy who "sell [due south] men dorsum their worst suspicions: / that everything's for sale, / and piecemeal" ("Helen of Troy Does Counter Dancing"); nosotros reconsider the trials of Cressida as she challenges Troilus'south solipsistic passion ("Cressida to Troilus: A Souvenir"); we experience the all-dark struggles of Mary Webster, hanged -- but non till expiry -- for witchcraft ("One-half-Hanged Mary"). A disarmingly autobiographical speaking presence animates several sections of this collection, picking up echoes of the fears and frustrations of these imaginatively reconceived characters. This presence resists melodrama, delivering the challenges of a mature date with the world with the searing wit and censor that have come to characterize Atwood's vision. This self charts an aging body, wondering "if I should let my hair go gray / so my advice will be better" ("Asparagus"), and reads the difference between "the real [sea], with its sick whales / and oil slicks" and "the other sea, where there can nevertheless be / safe arrivals" ("The Margaret Atwood Ottawa River by Night"). In "Waiting," this cocky confronts "the dark affair" that is both a saturated adult memory and a childhood intimation of bloodshed: and you realized for the get-go time in your life that you would exist erstwhile some day, you lot would some 24-hour interval be as erstwhile every bit y'all are at present The colliding "you"s in this verse form speak the necessity of respecifying experience as a function of passing time. Things are not always as they seem, Atwood's characters debate; the "young, smudgy torso" inches toward the surprise of "a stranger's body you could non even imagine" ("Waiting"), and Atwood configures that surprise with a clarity that allows for both pathos and wit. Morn in the Burned Business firm has all the hallmarks of Atwood's best writing: wickedly dark sense of humor, unflinching insight, sharply drawn images, tough and textured feminism. Occasionally, her clarity of purpose veers toward the pedantic: a poem like "Sekhmet, the Lion-Headed Goddess of State of war, Fierce Storms, Pestilence, and Recovery from Illness, Contemplates the Desert in the Metropolitan Museum of Art," despite the droll bluster of its title, gets mired in the didactic impulse, information technology seems to me; "Jail cell" has this flatness too, and "Helen of Troy Does Counter Dancing" ends with the lines "This is a torch song. / Touch me and you'll bum." The temptation to overspecify makes a few of these pieces experience inappropriately prosaic, and this may be compounded by their near relation to prose: the sentence is conspicuous throughout, its confidence at times cancelling the open-concluded resonance Atwood's images evoke so suggestively. For me, the most compelling section is the fourth, which conjures a dying father. Here, the judgement feels advisable, most understated, every bit if in the confront of the unspeakable -- bewilderment, retentiveness, loss -- we tin can only muster the unglamorous contours of grammatical structures to assert presence: Rage occurs, followed past supper: something he tin't taste, a dark-brown texture. The sun goes down. The copse bend, they straighten up. They bend. ("King Lear in Respite Care") These poems practice not permit the consolation of altitude; they move united states of america into the murky territory of the personal, where language recollects the particulars of another who'southward profoundly implicated in 1's own knowing, another who slips out of the present and into absenteeism. 'Me fourth section makes possible the lovely ambiguities of the fifth and terminal, with its conjuring, its visions, its wistful and wondrous connectedness with selves and others. These poems lead toward a form of knowing that survives -- and surpasses -- the indications of surfaces. To recognize a lover "when ... candies are no longer any utilize to us" ("Shapechangers in Wintertime"), to eat breakfast in a burned house when "there is no house, in that location is no breakfast" ("Forenoon in the Burned House"): this is "the identify of defenseless breath" ("Shapechangers in Winter"). Moving through the winnowing exacted past loss, Atwood arrives in a identify where configuring cocky and knowledge is a necessarily fluid enterprise, where at any moment we may be surprised by familiarity, caught in the sharp anguish of retentivity. She gives usa forenoon's promise in the burned house. MARGARET ATWOOD RECENTLY took time out from signing copies of Morning in the Burned House -- boxes of them, in fact -- at her publisher's office to speak to BiC almost her new volume, and about poetry in general. What qualities does Atwood well-nigh admire in a poem? "Kickoff of all," she says, "the use of language. 2d, a truth that has not been expressed in the same mode before, and that feeling of existence ambushed. Something unexpected just wonderful occurs." Many of the poems in Morning in the Burned House, like Atwood's past work, draw on fairy tale and myth. This fabric has a say-so not only for her just for everyone, she says. "I don't remember these stories would hang on unless they have something to exercise with our pre-rational fears and desires. That is just very fundamental stuff, and y'all detect it in every literature that we know anything about, oral ones included. Some people take speculated that the origin of poetry is mainly in spell, incantation, expletive -that it was originally, in fact, magic. And some of that aureola still lingers around exact incantation." For her, writing poetry and writing fiction are completely unlike processes. Novels "involve willpower. You can accept the idea in a fairly pocket-sized space of time, just actualizing that idea takes a long fourth dimension. So not feeling I like it today is not an alibi. If yous can't really compose that solar day, you go dorsum over what you have written and diddle with information technology, and proofread, and do all of those things. Poetry is the opposite in that you lot accept to have periods of blankness; you have to create a infinite for the poetry to appear in. That is why many people notice poets so difficult to live with. The novelist at least gives the appearance of existence industrious, whereas the poet quite frequently gives the appearance of doing nothing. Creating that blank space is a form of negative discipline, but non everyone can do it, because some people accept to be decorated doing something all the time." When asked whether some of the poems in her latest collection -- notably a very touching, emotionally direct group of poems about the death of her father- represent a new plow of mind, Atwood is emphatic that "it's a new turn of mind, just it'southward not an entirely new person. It's not completely discontinuous with previous work. It's not as if once upon a time I was Homer and now I'm Gerard Manley Hopkins."

Waiting Poem By Margaret Atwood,

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