Word: atwood
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...Margaret Atwood has often observed that Canadians like herself are all imigrants, outsiders in their own country. "We move in fear," she writes in The Journals of Susanne Moodie, "exiles and invaders." This obsession with the precarious nature of lives lived in a world that is not our own pervades much of her work. The feeling is particularly strong in her newest collection of poetry, Morning in the Burned House...
...seemingly simple question, "What been going on while I was away?" could easily apply to the author herself who, after a prolific decade spent writing novels and short stories, has returned to the politics or, perhaps, anti-politics of poetry. Reading these latest poems, one starts to miss Atwood-the-novelist a little bit. The author's brilliance still lies in her prose, and the new book is not a landmark like Cat's Eye or The Robber Bride. Nevertheless, Morning in the Burned House is solid and thoughtful, an inventive re-working of familiar Atwood themes. It also accomplishes...
Life and middle age, Atwood's characters realize in part one of Morning in the Burned House, have become a kind of ghost town from which they can't--and don't necessarily want-to escape. God isn't exactly dead, but He seems to be on permanent leave. One is reminded of Geoffrey Hill's pithy "Ovid in the Third Reich": "God is distant, difficult/Things happen...
...book's title suggests, the home itself serves as an accessible metaphor for this sense of existiential and philosohpical exhaustion. In one poem, a woman, or rather, Atwood's ubiquitous, unnamed "you" character, wanders around her kitchen at 2:30 a.m., engaging in a refreshingly unpretentious bit of meditation...
...book's second section, Atwood looks outward to mythology, both ancient (Helen of Troy, Troilus and Cressida) and contemporary (Ava Gardner), often weighing in with satirical observations about sexual politics. In "Miss July Grows Older," another version of the modern myth, an aging pin-up girl comes to represent sexual charlatanry of all kinds ("Men were a skill," "Don't get me wrong: with the lights out/I'd still take on anyone"). The narrative voice is reminiscent of the prickly teenage heroine...