Power Politics

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.

Anansi’s reissue a quarter-century later of Atwood’s poems from 1971
shows a consistency in the Atwoodian voice. Power Politics opens with a
piece that, perhaps more than any other, typifies Atwood’s early work:
“you fit into me / like a hook into an eye // a fish hook / an open
eye.” The voice here is as needful as it is wary, trying—usually
unsuccessfully—to connect with a lover in ways not tainted by
stereotype, “aphorisms,” or the discourse of power politics.
Truth-telling and lies recur as motifs, especially the speaker’s
inability to distinguish between them. Herself a shape-shifter, she
manipulates others: “It would be so good if you’d / only stay up
there / where I put you, I could / believe, you’d solve / most of my
religious problems.”

Readers may want to conclude that the astringency of the voice and
sinister quality of the imagery in this spare volume are unwarranted,
but they seem not to be. Cover blurbs on this anniversary issue by
Forché, Hutcheon, Michaels, and Thesen echo Webb’s: the volume
“goes beyond sexual politics into the dark heart of a tottering global
village.”

Should this volume be all that a non-Canadian reads of Canadian
literature, consider the view that emerges. The couple play out their
love affair in an unaccommodating northern setting and threaten to
transform into flesh-eating wilderness things. This Canada is not
marketable through the usual North American media channels, and as a
result—despite or because of its harshness—Atwood’s Canada still
compels readers even after all these years.