Dearly

Poems

Margaret Atwood

• Publisher: Ecco
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780063032514
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Women in Poetry
• Index: Literature

A new book of poetry from internationally acclaimed, award-winning and bestselling author Margaret Atwood

In Dearly, Margaret Atwood's first collection of poetry in over a decade, Atwood addresses themes such as love, loss, the passage of time, the nature of nature and - zombies. Her new poetry is introspective and personal in tone, but wide-ranging in topic. In poem after poem, she casts her unique imagination and unyielding, observant eye over the landscape of a life carefully and intuitively lived.

While many are familiar with Margaret Atwood's fiction—including her groundbreaking and bestselling novels The Handmaid's Tale, The Testaments, Oryx and Crake, among others—she has, from the beginning of her career, been one of our most significant contemporary poets. And she is one of the very few writers equally accomplished in fiction and poetry.This collection is a stunning achievement that will be appreciated by fans of her novels and poetry readers alike.

IV.

Walking in the Madman’s Wood

Walking in the madman’s wood

over the disquieted dry shushing leaves

in early spring.

The madman loved this wildland

once, before his brain

turned lacework. Must have been

him (when?) who put

this round stone here, topping

the mossy oblong. Mine.

And all the tin can

lids and wooden squares,

rough-painted red and nailed to trees

to mark his line:

mine, mine, mine, mine.

I shouldn’t say that cancelled word:

madman. Maybe lost his mind?

No, because we don’t have minds

as such these days, but tiny snarls

of firefly neural pathways

signalling no/yes/no, suspended

in a greyish cloud

inside a round bone bowl.

Yes: lovely. No: too lonely. Yes.

The world that we think we see

is only our best guess.

This must have been his shack,

collapsed now, where he’d—what?

Come sometimes and sit? Hepaticas

wrenched up by sun,

brown tufts of hairbrush grass,

the toppled stove, the wild leeks

so glossy they look wet,

the soft log frilled with mushrooms.

You could get waylaid here, or slip amazed

into your tangled head. You could

just not come back.

Feather

One by handfuls the feathers fell.

Windsheer, sunbleach, owlwar,

some killer with a shotgun,

who can tell?

But I found them here on the quasi-lawn—

I don’t know whose torn skin—

calligraphy of wrecked wings,

remains of a god that melted

too near the moon.

A high flyer once,

as we all were.

Every life is a failure

at the last hour,

the hour of dried blood.

But nothing, we like to think,

is wasted, so I picked up one plume from the slaughter,

sharpened and split the quill,

hunted for ink,

and drew this poem

with you, dead bird.

With your spent flight,

with your fading panic,

with your eye spiralling down,

with your night.

Fatal Light Awareness

A thrush crashed into my window:

one lovely voice the less

killed by glass as mirror—

a rich magician’s illusion of trees—

and by my laziness:

Why didn’t I hang the lattice?

Up there in the night air

among the highrises, music dies

as you fire up your fake sunrises:

your light is the birds’ last darkness.

All over everywhere

their feathers are falling—

warm, not like snow—

though melting away to nothing.

We are a dying symphony.

No bird knows this,

but us—we know

what our night magic...