Interlunar

Elizabeth Stieg taught English in Toronto.

Margaret Atwood’s is a powerful poetry that probes and explores the underside of the human, the unconscious and instinctual side which we choose largely to ignore. Interlunar, her tenth collection of poetry, is powerful evidence of her continuing, vigorous poetic presence. It is a poetry of magic and incantation, of effective utterance which creates what it describes.

“Interlunar” refers to the period of darkness between the dying of the old moon and the birth of the new. The darkness is symbolic of the unnamed fears that have their origin in the ultimate fear — the fear of chaos and death; but it is also, like the snake, symbolic of the capacity for regeneration. It is the darkness of the descent that must be essayed if renewal is to be achieved.

The first section, “Snake Poems,” sounds a theme that recurs throughout, that of transformation and rebirth:

All nature is a fire

we burn in and are

renewed, one skin

shed and then another

The snake, symbol and articulator of this process, is “a voice from the dead,” a “prophet under a stone” which we retreat from in fear and loathing or savagely destroy.

But pick it up and you would hold

the darkness that you fear

turned flesh and embers,

cool power coiling into your wrists

and it would be in your hands

where it always has been.

Interlunar leads its reader through the darkness of savagery and death, the life of instinct and intuition, in the belief that the power of these forces is far greater than that which is available to those who choose to live a purely rational or intellectual existence. “This,” Atwood tells us, “is how I learned to steer /through darkness by no stars.” Her purpose, she says simply, is “to show you the darkness you are so afraid of.” In Interlunar, she accomplishes it with both power and a strange and rather wonderful beauty.