A groundbreaking meditation on sexual politics, love, and human tenacity from the world-renowned pioneer of feminist writing and prophetic author of The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood.
When it first appeared in 1971, Margaret Atwood's Power Politics startled readers with its vital dance of woman and man. It still startles today, and is just as iconoclastic as ever. These poems occupy all at once the intimate, the political, and the mythic. Here Atwood makes us realize that we may think our own personal dichotomies are unique, but really they are multiple, universal. Clear, direct, wry, and unrelenting — Atwood's poetic powers are honed to perfection in this seminal work from her early career.
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In view of the fading animals the proliferation of sewers and fears the sea clogging, the air nearing extinction
we should be kind, we should take warning, we should forgive each other
Instead we are opposite, we touch as though attacking,
the gifts we bring even in good faith maybe warp in our hands to implements, to manoeuvres
2
Put down the target of me you guard inside your binoculars, in turn I will surrender
this aerial photograph (your vulnerable sections marked in red) I have found so useful
See, we are alone in the dormant field, the snow that cannot be eaten or captured
3
Here there are no armies here there is no money
It is cold and getting colder
We need each others’ breathing, warmth, surviving is the only war we can afford, stay
walking with me, there is almost time / if we can only make it as far as
the (possibly) last summer
Returning from the dead used to be something I did well
I began asking why I began forgetting how
Spring again, can I stand it shooting its needles into the earth, my head, both used to darkness
Snow on brown soil and the squashed caterpillar coloured liquid lawn
Winter collapses in slack folds around my feet / no leaves yet / loose fat
Thick lilac buds crouch for the spurt but I hold back
Not ready / help me what I want from you is moonlight smooth as wind, long hairs of water
This year I intended children a space where I could raise foxes and strawberries, finally be reconciled to fur seeds & burrows
but the entrails of dead cards are against me, foretell it will be water, the
element that shaped me, that I shape by being in
It is the blue cup, I fill it
it is the pond again where the children, looking from the side of the boat, see their mother
upside down, lifesize, hair streaming over the slashed throat and words fertilize each other in the cold and with bulging eyes
I am sitting on the edge of the impartial bed, I have been turned to crystal, you enter
bringing love in the form of a cardboard box (empty) a pocket (empty) some hands (also empty)
Be careful I say but how can you
the empty thing comes out of your hands, it fills the room slowly, it is a pressure, a lack of pressure
Like a deep sea creature with glass bones and wafer eyes drawn to the surface, I break
open, the pieces of me shine briefly in your empty hands
I see you fugitive, stumbling across the prairie, lungs knotted by thirst, sunheat nailing you down, all the things after you that can be after you with their clamps and poisoned mazes
Should I help you? Should I make you a mirage?
My right hand unfolds rivers around you, my left hand releases its trees, I speak rain, I spin you a night and you hide in it.
Now you have one enemy instead of many.
We are standing facing each other in an eighteenth century room with fragile tables and mirrors in carved frames; the curtains, red brocade, are drawn
the doors are shut, you aren’t talking, the chandeliers aren’t talking, the carpets
also remain silent. You stay closed, your skin is buttoned firmly around you, your mouth is a tin decoration, you are in the worst possible taste.
You are fake as the marble trim around the fireplace, there is nothing I wouldn’t do t...
