Selected Poems 2: Poems Selected and New, 1976-1986

Robert Seiler was Assistant Professor of General Studies at the University of Calgary.

Since the publication of The Circle Game, which won the 1966 Governor General’s Award, Margaret Atwood has published twelve volumes of poetry, six novels, a collection of short stories, two books of criticism, an anthology of poetry, and two books of children’s stories. The first Selected Poems reprinted poetry published during the period 1966-76. The second Selected Poems includes work published between 1976 and 1986. The 120 poems which comprise this new volume (20 new poems have been included as a bonus) represent Atwood’s best work to date.

What is particularly striking about this volume is the control Atwood has exercised over her material. These poems, which have been carefully organized into patterns, trace the development of a vision that is more unified in its diversity than the reader might have noticed over the past ten years. That vision is Atwood’s on-going fascination with mythology and its role in everyday life.

Itcan be argued that Atwood now speaks with the most distinctive voice in Canadian literature, There is no mistaking the colloquial vigor and sardonic wit with which she startles the reader. Her mastery of the line recalls that of Robert Frost and Dylan Thomas. Her mastery of the image, which unfolds in an elliptical style, recalls that of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.

Readers of her fiction and poetry know that Atwood wears many masks. These disguises enable her to explore a variety of subjects, including the difference between the inner and the outer self. In the first section of Selected Poems II, which includes poems from Two-Headed Poems (1978), she speaks as a woman who has settled on the land with her family. In poems like “Daybrook I” and “Daybrook II,” this persona reflects on the experience of “creating,” that is, as a mother and as a poet. Her reflections on geography and language, as forces which shape intimate experience, unify the poems.

In the second section, which includes poems from True Stories (1981), Atwood speaks not as the charming mother who presents her child to the world but as the laconic poet who presents her poem to the world. In poems like “True Romances” the persona explores the pain of writing: “It isn’t sex that’s the problem, it’s language.”

The third section includes 13 prose-poems from Murder in the Dark (1983). Here the persona glances at Atwood’s favourite subject, the relationship between art and life. This is a reference to the eye of intuition, not reason.

The fourth section, which consists of 37 poems from Interlunar (1984), explores the process of renewal through transformation. The persona takes the reader through reworked versions of the myths of Orpheus, Euridice and Persephone among others. The imagery gives a sense of permanence to “being” as well as “potentiality,” which together form the cycle of life, death and rebirth. Matter is thus always in a state of transition. The term “interlunar” refers to the period between the old moon and the new, the period between the sinister waning moon and the regenerative waxing moon. The moon is thus constant as well as changing. This section ends with the title poem, “Interlunar,” which reaffirms the process by which men and women can work through change to a state of peace.

In the 19 poems which conclude Selected Poems II Atwood returns to language and geography as metaphors for states of mind. The persona here is the ageing female poet who tries to formulate her vision of “a new order.”

The reader will find this new volume fascinating as well as disturbing. Like all great poetry, Selected Poems II works its effects primarily through the vigor of its language. However, the vision depicted here is at times rather gloomy. As the persona in “Not the Moon” says, “You fish for the silver light, there in the quiet lake, so clear/to see; you plunge your hands into the water and come up empty.”