The Circle Game

Shannon Hengen is an associate professor of English at Laurentian
University and the author of Margaret Atwood’s Power: Mirrors,
Reflections and Images in Select Fiction and Poetry.

House of Anansi’s reissue of Margaret Atwood’s first published book,
more than three decades later, has the feel of a millennial project. The
“millenniums” here are “green” and show “sunlight steaming
merciless on the shores of morning.” The circular motion at the centre
of this book thus brings around images of light and morning, even if
“merciless,” along with those more sombre.

To hear the voice of this early Atwood meditating on time seems
particularly significant at century’s end. Offering no prophecies, the
book nevertheless locates the persona at a turning point when she must
come to terms with things temporal. Primary among those are the
differences concerning how she and the lover figure perceive timeas well
as whose version of it they will live by. The title poem ends, “I want
the circle / broken,” however unlikely that action seems throughout
the rest of the poems. If the circle is in part the movement of time,
the pair would need to enter chaos to step out of it, and in an
epistolary poem she writes to the lover, “[Y]ou don’t find / my
forms of chaos ... congenial.” While the orderliness of time and
repetition cannot be avoided, their power must be understood.

Atwood’s early poems of movement forward and backward in place and
time reappear now with striking appropriateness. Through the peculiar
workings of her voice and imagery, nature itself enters into the flux of
time, just as things human reach stasis; then the pattern reverses.

Sherrill Grace’s introduction, reprinted from 1978, has also survived
the years. Like any important work, these poems, which won the Governor
General’s Award for Poetry in 1967, speak both to their own time and
to those beyond.