Morning in the Burned House

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

Morning in the Burned House is one of those rare books of poetry that
appear on bestseller lists. This is, of course, heartening in a way,
though nobody knows how many of these copies are actually read, or what
the more casual buyers—people who don’t normally read poetry—make
of them.

I suspect they would be attracted initially to the more obviously
personal poems written about the death of the poet’s father, and they
would, I think, be right in such a preference. The subject is
universally accessible, and Atwood approaches it with a directness, a
simplicity, an authenticity that looks simple but is artistically
hard-won. “He was sitting in a chair at dinner / and a wave washed
over him. / Suddenly, whole beaches / were simply gone.” Reading that,
we recognize that we are in the presence of major poetry.

And there are other poems—“In the Secular Night” and
“February,” among others—that superbly catch the brash, brittle,
angular quality of modern urban-middle-class living. These too, should
provoke a startled and enriched response. Of some of the more
“Gothic” pieces (“Owl Burning,” for example), I’m not so sure.
Vintage Atwood and parody Atwood can be disturbingly close. One poem,
“Cell,” begins: “Now look objectively. You have to / admit the
cancer cell is beautiful. / If it were a flower, you’d say, How pretty
...” Alas, I can’t help exclaiming “How Atwood!” From time to
time, the recipe becomes self-conscious; form lapses into formula.

A somewhat uneven collection, then, whatever the advertising brouhaha
may say. But, at her best, the inimitable Atwood intelligence and
sharpness remain.