11/19/2023
Margaret Atwood
This morning, we note the birth date of Margaret Atwood (born November 18, 1939), Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, inventor, teacher, and environmental activist.
In her early poetry collections, Double Persephone (1961), The Circle Game (1964, revised in 1966), and The Animals in That Country (1968), Atwood ponders human behavior, celebrates the natural world, and condemns materialism.
Role reversal and new beginnings are recurrent themes in her novels, all of them centered on women seeking their relationship to the world and the individuals around them.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) is constructed around the written record of a woman living in s*xual slavery in a repressive Christian theocracy of the future that has seized power in the wake of an ecological upheaval.
The Booker Prize-winning The Blind Assassin (2000) is an intricately constructed narrative centering on the memoir of an elderly Canadian woman ostensibly writing in order to dispel confusion about both her sister’s su***de and her own role in the posthumous publication of a novel supposedly written by her sister.
Other novels by Atwood include the surreal The Edible Woman (1969); Surfacing (1972), an exploration of the relationship between nature and culture that centers on a woman’s return to her childhood home in the northern wilderness of Quebec; Lady Oracle (1976); Cat’s Eye (1988); The Robber Bride (1993); and Alias Grace (1996), a fictionalized account of a real-life Canadian girl who was convicted of two murders in a sensationalist 1843 trial. Atwood’s 2005 novel, The Penelopiad: The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus, was inspired by Homer’s Odyssey.
Here are two of her poems for your consideration:
Variations on the Word Love
This is a word we use to plug
holes with. It's the right size for those warm
blanks in speech, for those red heart-
shaped vacancies on the page that look nothing
like real hearts. Add lace
and you can sell
it. We insert it also in the one empty
space on the printed form
that comes with no instructions. There are whole
magazines with not much in them
but the word love, you can
rub it all over your body and you
can cook with it too. How do we know
it isn't what goes on at the cool
debaucheries of slugs under damp
pieces of cardboard? As for the w**d-
seedlings nosing their tough snouts up
among the lettuces, they shout it.
Love! Love! sing the soldiers, raising
their glittering knives in salute.
Then there's the two
of us. This word
is far too short for us, it has only
four letters, too sparse
to fill those deep bare
vacuums between the stars
that press on us with their deafness.
It's not love we don't wish
to fall into, but that fear.
this word is not enough but it will
have to do. It's a single
vowel in this metallic
silence, a mouth that says
O again and again in wonder
and pain, a breath, a finger
grip on a cliffside. You can
hold on or let go.
--Margaret Atwood
[ from True Stories (Oxford University Press, 1981)]
_______________________
The Moment
The moment when, after many years
of hard work and a long voyage
you stand in the centre of your room,
house, half-acre, square mile, island, country,
knowing at last how you got there,
and say, I own this,
is the same moment when the trees unloose
their soft arms from around you,
the birds take back their language,
the cliffs fissure and collapse,
the air moves back from you like a wave
and you can't breathe.
No, they whisper. You own nothing.
You were a visitor, time after time
climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming.
We never belonged to you.
You never found us.
It was always the other way round.
--Margaret Atwood
[from Eating Fire (Virago, 1998), © Margaret Atwood 1998]
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