Selected Poems 1: 1965-1975

Beautiful Collection of poetry. Covers vastly different topics but with the same attention to details and beautiful flow to the feelings she shares in her poems. I feel connected to the author.

I had to order this book for a class and little did I know that it had been signed by Margret Atwood! boy, for only a few dollars, I really lucked out!

Margaret Atwood's poems are timeless examples of vintage speculative poetry.

Not all her poems are anymore so surprising and original anymore, there are repetitions of a poetic rebellious pattern or model she found and repeated. Interesting anyway.

I can't get enough.

Such great writing and the poetics are beyond imagining. A walk in a world away!

thanks

Margaret Atwood holds up a knife. She flashes it in the light of the reader. She traces it along the flesh, and threatens violence, but she never throws the knife, nor does she inflict a wound. Occasionally a drop will surface, perhaps this is her intent, perhaps it isn't, perhaps it was the reader's pulling of her tool too close. This vacillation between whether or not the cut was meant or merely the idea of the cut is precisely where Atwood' poetry succeeds. Violence is inherent in the world, it is natural, it can be gruesome, blunt and bloody, or simple, quiet and clean. This is the loom upon which Atwood weaves. In her Selected Poems 1965-1975 we find a tapestry containing all possible combinations of these facets of violence. Throughout we find drowned sons and fires, the blood of animals and humans, menacing, inner and outer warfare, revolts, rebellions. In Departures From The Bush the poem begins after a fire that has `erased' a bush, and the eventual occupation of said bush by animals, the fear involved in that occupation, the bareness of the limbs, the strange glowing eyes of the creatures that have made the burnt bush their home. In The Animals Of That Country there are images of a slain bull, wolves looming in the thick forests and finally a statement on the lack of elegance in death, especially in the deaths of the nameless. There is also the slow violence of withering, and aging into death or history, as in Elegy For The Giant Tortoises, and The Death Of The Other Children, both poems evoke the erosion upon a body by life. In all the selections of Circe/Mud Poems. Atwood explores the violent nature of choice, and how the very act of choosing one thing over another leaves the unchosen in a coffin. But again Atwood leaves it to the reader as to whether or not there will be blood "I made no choice, I decided nothing." And to Odysseus "will you hurt me? if you do I will fear you, if you don't I will despise you, to be feared, to be despised, theses are your choices." If violences are the consonants, then transformations are the vowels. It is these two parts that form the words of Atwood's language. She transforms herself into a mirror repeatedly, as well as a heraldic emblem in the poem of the same title, she also transforms herself into Circe as well as transforming her subjects into Cyclopes and fortresses, and hunters, as well as an entire selection of poems called Songs Of The Transformed in which she gives the reader a first person account of being among other things worms, a siren, a bull, a fox, and pig and an owl that is "the heart of a murdered woman, who took the wrong way home, who was strangled in a vacant lot and not buried, who was shot with care beneath a tree. . ." The first words of each line in the first stanza beginning with `who'. For Atwood there is always in the poem it seems a consideration of what is not being said, A nod to the universes created by the negative space, what one could do and the nature of that possibility in regard to the possibility that one could, though may not. This seems too to be evident in the subjects she chooses as well, the animals that she is not, the mirror that she could not possibly be, the songs and elegies of those that lie in pauper's graves. There could be, no there is, an entire song, there in the anonymous worms, a rebellion beneath our feet, there is Circe's side to the story there is the reflection's tale to tell. In a literary environment that sometimes seems to reach too far into the viscera, or too far in the other direction it is refreshing to read something that seems to meet itself halfway between the guts and great unknown. For it seems to Atwood that there is no better way to find the self than to become something else and look back at oneself through those eyes, even though those eyes are still irrevocably one's own. This attachment through detachment is a transformation wrought violently between the self and the other. transformation is violent, even if it is not covered in blood and screaming into death beneath the moonlight. Or maybe it is, Atwood begs you to decide, she has flashed us the knife, she has shown us the weapon, it is up to us to decide the rest.