Word: atwoods
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...Atwood has been rather shallowly labelled a feminist writer (and a "radical" one at that), but Morning in the Burned House reveals an authorial voice that is far more complex. Make no mistake, Atwood's voice is, and always has been, undeniably female. Although she has retreated some from the stance of her now famous epigram "you fit into me/like a hook into an eye/a fish hook/an open eye," the idea of Atwood-as-radical is still strong. But Atwood also understands instinctually the difference between politically-charged writing and propaganda...
...poetry, Atwood manages to avoid the sentimental preachiness so evident in an openly feminist writer such as Marge Piercy. Part three of Morning in the Burned House takes up explicitly feminist and female concerns, but Atwood's transition between the personal and the political is seamless, maintaining a crucial, delicate balance...
...Atwood saves herself from the feminist/political trap because as an artist, she remains fascinated by subversiveness, avoiding a man-evil, woman-good dichotomy. The poet is interested, instead, in the duality of the individual, and especially the female, self. She articulates this well in "The Loneliness of the Military Historian," describing a female scholar's fascination with the "masculine...
Toward the end of the book, Atwood finds the spectre of death looming ever closer, though without the hope of salvation such as Mary Webster's. Part four is a series of poems written for a dying parent. In one scene, a woman tries to remember her father through a series of dream images, each proving elusive and unsatisfactory. In another scene, Shakespearean tragedy undergoes a reversal that is anything but, as a Lear figure finds himself watching terrible television in nursing home...
...Atwood offers the reader little real solace through these confrontations with death. She retreats instead to the realm of imagination. The speaker in "Morning in the Burned House," the final poem in the collection, revels in the bizarre, hallucinatory state between life and death, imagined as a peaceful yet disquieting domestic scene...