Word: poeme
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This striking poem is the final realization of the book's rather cryptic title. In the end, the poet is left only with the "burned house" of her own, singular body, "holding my cindery, non-existent/radiant flesh. Incandescent...
...come back into the room/where you've been living/all along," declares the displaced narrator of the collection's first poem, "You Come Back." Her 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...
...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...
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...
After the reading. Montague said he hoped that listeners would "feel provoked and...think about poetry in general. Poetry is one of the few proofs that we have that we can make things that are permanent. People are born, people die. A really good poem seems to hold...