The Circle Game (1966)
This collection, the cover of which the poet designed
herself, won the Governor General’s Award and established twenty-seven-year-old
Atwood as a prominent voice in Canadian poetry. Dominated, as the
title suggests, by images of circles, the poems in this collection explore
the deceptive ordinariness of day-to-day life and the terrors of
a universe threatened by technology. Many of the poems in The Circle
Game are among Atwood’s best-loved work. Characterized by
uneven line lengths and the absence of conventional meters and rhymes,
this collection launched Atwood’s particular brand of forceful,
honest poetry.
The Animals in That Country (1968)
This collection introduces many of the obsessions that
will haunt much of Atwood’s later work: the contrast between the
familiar and the unknown, the gulf between civilization and wilderness,
and the difference between society, a place where animals “have
the faces of people,” and the shadowy place where animals “have
the faces of animals.” Notable poems in this volume are “At the
tourist centre in Boston,” “Elegy for the giant tortoises,” “The
Landlady,” and “More and more.” Atwood explores many of the same
themes in her novel Surfacing, which was published
four years later, in 1972.
The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970)
In these poems, Atwood re-imagines Canadian history from
the perspective of a famous pioneer woman, Susanna Strickland Moodie (1803–1885),
an Englishwoman who documented her immigration to Upper Canada in
poems and journals. Atwood traces Moodie’s life from her 1832 arrival
in Canada through her years in the unsettled bush of Upper Canada
to the late 1960s,
when the mythic pioneer woman continues to send messages from beyond
the grave. Arranged as a series of three chronological journals,
this collection dramatizes what Atwood has called the “paranoid
schizophrenia” of Canadian identity and revisits some of her favorite
themes: the brutality of civilization and awe of the landscape,
the terrors of the forest, and the space between the picturesque
and the sinister. Since the publication of Atwood’s Journals
of Susanna Moodie, this pioneer woman has become an iconic,
archetypal figure in Canadian culture.
Procedures for Underground (1970)
Published the same year as The Journals of Susanna
Moodie, Procedures for Underground is
a dark work dealing with haunting reflections on the past and the
omnipresence of death. Many of these poems confront loss and oblivion,
as conveyed by the most famous line from this collection: “Where
do the words go / when we have said them?” Like its predecessor, Procedures
for Underground explores wilderness themes, distant epochs
“before electricity,” and remote Canadian regions. “Girl and Horse, 1928,”
“A Soul, Geologically,” and “Habitation” are some of its notable
poems.
Power Politics (1971)
As the title indicates, this collection represents one
of Atwood’s most overtly political works and, it is her most explicit
and anguished treatment of the battle between the sexes. However, Atwood
rejects the widespread interpretation of Power Politics as
a straightforward account of women being victimized by men. Starting
with the collection’s graphic epitaph, these poems confront the suffering
and dependence that unite and divide men and women (“If I love you
/ is that a fact or a weapon?”), as well as confront larger existential
concerns (“it is no longer possible to be both human and alive”).
When Atwood wrote Power Politics, she was gaining
fame as a writer at home and abroad, and many of the poems reveal
her growing preoccupation with the demands of public life.
You Are Happy (1974)
After a career in poetry marked by unremittingly dark
themes, Atwood seeks happiness and fulfillment amid the suffering
and despair of life in this book of poems. The very title is equivocal
and ironic, more an attempt at self-persuasion than a statement
of fact. You Are Happy is divided into two sections,
“Songs of the Transformed” and “Circe / Mud Poems.” The first contains
a series of poems told from the animal’s point of view; the second
is a reworking of the Circe myth in the Odyssey,
told from Circe’s point of view.
Two-Headed Poems (1978)
In her first collection after giving birth to her daughter,
Jess, in 1976, Atwood
returns to her preoccupation with the female body, particularly
in the poems “The Woman Who Could Not Live With Her Faulty Heart”
and “The Woman Makes Peace With Her Faulty Heart.” Two-Headed
Poems also contains several harrowing historical poems,
most notably “Four Small Elegies,” which revisits one of the bloodiest
incidents in Canadian history, a revolt against the British colonizers
by the civilians in Beauharnois, Quebec (then Lower Canada). Later
in the collection, the prose poem “Marrying the Hangman” dramatizes
the bizarre eighteenth-century law in Quebec that allows a man to
escape a sentence of death by becoming a hangman and a woman to
escape the sentence by marrying one.
True Stories (1981)
In the early 1980s,
Atwood became active in a series of human-rights organizations,
particularly the Canadian branch of Amnesty International. True
Stories displays a marked concern with political oppression
and environmental devastation. The title of the volume suggests
a journalist’s allegiance to the “truth.” In the poem “Torture,”
Atwood insists that power is “not abstract, it’s not concerned /
with politics and free will, it’s beyond slogans.” This collection
also features the long poem “Notes Towards a Poem That Can Never
Be Written” about atrocities that take place every day, everywhere. This
same year, she published Bodily Harm, a novel that
explores similar themes.
Interlunar (1984)
Interlunar, one of Atwood’s least-discussed
collections, is divided into two sections. The first, “Snake Woman,”
elaborates on and explores one of her favorite motifs, the snake.
The second section, “Interlunar,” contains a poem that she later
used as a title for a novel, “The Robber Bridegroom,” and features
several more “updated” myths retold from a female point of view,
including “Orpheus,” “Eurydice,” and “Letter from Persephone.”
Selected Poems I (1965–1975)
This compilation includes the bulk of Atwood’s first major
collection, The Circle Game, as well as sizeable
excerpts from The Animals in That Country, The Journals
of Susanna Moodie, Procedures for Underground, Power
Politics, and You Are Happy.
Selected Poems II (1976–1986)
This collection, published in 1987,
comprises selections of Atwood’s work from Two-Headed Poems, True
Stories, and Interlunar. The last twenty
poems in the book are new and previously unpublished poems written
in 1985 and 1986.
Among the highlights of this section are several ironic and self-reflective
meditations on aging, including “Aging Female Poet Sits on the Balcony,” “Aging
Female Poet Reads Little Magazines,” and “Aging Female Poet on Laundry
Day.”
Morning in the Burned House (1995)
This volume, the co-winner of the prestigious Trillium
Award, was Atwood’s first collection of new poems to be published
in more than eight years. She wrote most of the poems while on a
publicity tour for The Robber Bride. This collection
includes several humorous monologues, including “Miss July Grows
Older,” “Helen of Troy Does Counter Dancing,” and “Ava Gardner Reincarnated
as a Magnolia.” The final section is a series of interconnected
elegies that deal with the 1993 death
of Atwood’s father, which some critics rank among her finest poems.
