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In Review

21 November 2008 22:55 BST

The Door by Margaret Atwood

Published by Virago Press, out now, 130 pages, £9.99.

In a nutshell…

Searing, intimate, intellectual, varied, ambitious.

What it's all about

The Door is collection of poems is divided into five sections, which are left untitled but broadly adhere to moods of reminiscence, self-analysis, anger, mysticism and repose respectively. However, they could just as easily be categorised as themes - the past, poetry, politics, unanswered questions and age.

The device - more common in anthologies than collections - is suggestive of the episodes of epic narrative. And these 51 lyrics, though mostly in the first-person, have scope as well as depth because of their mythical allusion and spirit of communal reflection.

Who's it by

Atwood's prolific and polymathic output has been somewhat obscured by the phenomenal global success of The Handmaid's Tale, an A-level set text which won the Booker prize in 1986 and plunges the reader into a dystopic future where sexuality is regulated by totalitarian religious zealots.

Yet the Canadian started out as a poet, winning the E J Pratt Medal for her first collection of poems, Double Persephone, when she was just 21.

Of her 18 verse collections, the best known is The Journals of Susanna Moodie, written from the imagined perspective of a well-known nineteenth-century Canadian writer.

In addition to writing poetry and novels, Atwood is also an activist, feminist and esteemed literary critic.

As an example

"Everything speckled and faded, jumbled
together like – let's say – this bowl
of miscellaneous pebbles gathered
time after time on beaches now
eroded or misplaced, but scooped up then
and fingered for their beauty,
and pocketed as pure mementoes
of some once indelible day." - Year of the Hen

Likelihood of becoming a Hollywood Blockbuster

The closest poetry has come to being adapted for film is in biopics like Sylvia - with Gwyneth Paltrow as the tortured Ms Plath - and the forthcoming The Edge of Love based on the life of Dylan Thomas. Atwood is at a disadvantage having neither died at a tragically young age nor lived dissolutely.

What the others say

"Atwood's poems are short, glistening with terse, bright images, untentative, closing like a vice…A plain, explicit poetry, perfectly sure of itself." - New York Times

"Atwood is always vital, powerful, magnetically readable. . . . Readers who know only her novels really owe it to themselves to read her poems." - Booklist

So is it any good?

This is a consistently engaging collection, with some diamonds among lesser gems. The tone ranges from urgent to pensive, humorous to impassioned, witty to enraged, so that we never tire of the largely first-person voice.

The diamonds occur mainly in the first section. Year of the Hen, from which the above example is taken, demonstrates Atwood's metrical agility within her free verse form. You don't need an English degree to appreciate the aural beauty of that final line with its resolutely regular stress pattern - the emphatic beat is in direct contrast to the wistful sentiment. The "once indelible" day is now lost, deleted - a delicious oxymoron.

Section three's more political offerings are sometimes a little too heavy-handed to be truly effective poetry, a weakness shared by Mourning for Cats in the otherwise joyous first section.

Atwood partakes of one of the oldest genres with her poems about poetry, which subscribe to the view of the poet as a kind of oracle, destined to be misunderstood because of being ahead of his or her time. It would be unkind to suggest that Atwood might be taking this interpretation literally with her mystical poems. They are self-confessedly "cryptic" and clever-clever in a way which is bound to annoy some readers, but there are diamonds here too, epitomised by Questioning the Dead with its striking image of the deceased "flickering like faulty toasters".

9/10

Meghan Graham