The Circle Game
Margaret Atwood
- 96 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
The Circle Game
Margaret Atwood
About This Book
As a part of the launch of the new A List series, a curated selection of titles from Anansi's backlist featuring handsome new covers and introductions by well-known writers, comes Margaret Atwood's Governor General's Literary Awardâwinning The Circle Game, with an introduction by Suzanne Buffam.
The appearance of Margaret Atwood's first major collection of poetry marked the beginning of a truly outstanding career in Canadian and international letters. The voice in these poems is as witty, vulnerable, direct, and incisive as we've come to know in later works, such as Power Politics, Bodily Harm, and Alias Grace. Atwood writes compassionately about the risks of love in a technological age, and the quest for identity in a universe that cannot quite be trusted.
Containing many of Atwood's best and most famous poems, The Circle Game won the 1966 Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry and rapidly attained an international reputation as a classic of modern poetry.
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The Circle Game
joined hand to hand
go round and round
the next arm, around
full circle
until it comes
back into each of the single
bodies again
not to each other:
their feet move
almost in time to the singing
the concentration on
their faces, their eyes
fixed on the empty
moving spaces just in
front of them.
tranced moving for joy
but there is no joy in it
as we watch them go
round and round
intent, almost
studious (the grass
underfoot ignored, the trees
circling the lawn
ignored, the lake ignored)
that the whole point
of going round and round
is (faster
going round and round
here, in this room
whose glass has melted
to the consistency
of gelatin
(and I)
an exact reflection, yet
will not walk from the glass,
be separate.
that they have put
so many mirrors here
(chipped, hung crooked)
in this room with its high transom
and empty wardrobe; even
the back of the door
has one.
arguing, opening and closing drawers
(the walls are thin)
to them, perhaps, or
watching
your own reflection somewhere
behind my head,
over my shoulder
sags under us, losing its focus
remote, listening)
in all their games
there seems
to be some reason
abstract they
at first appear
in the evening
of monstrous battles, and secret
betrayals in the forest
and brutal deaths,
one yawned and fidgeted; another
chewed the wooden handle
of a hammer;
the youngest one examined
a slight cut on his toe,
they could remain
completely without fear
or even interest
as the final sword slid through
the dying hero.
walking along the beach
they had been making:
fortified with pointed sticks
driven into the sides
of their sand moats
with no bridges:
(however
eroded by the water
in an hour)
to make
maybe, a refuge human
and secure from the reach
(sword hearted)
these night beaches.
I notice how
all your word-
plays, calculated ploys
of the body, the witticisms
of touch, are now
attempts to keep me
at a certain distance
and (at length) avoid
admitting I am here
watching my face
indifferently
yet with the same taut curiosity
with which you might regard
a suddenly discovered part
of your own body:
a wart perhaps,
you said
in childhood you were
a tracer of maps
(not making but) moving
a pen or a forefinger
over the courses of the rivers,
the different colours
that mark the rise of mountains;
a memorizer
of names (to hold
these places
in their proper places)
like a countryâs boundary
or a strange new wrinkle in
your own wellknown skin
down on the outspread map
of this room, of your mindâs continent
the wardrobe and the mirrors
the voices through the wall
your body ignored on the bed),
by your eyesâ
cold blue thumbtacks
of grey stone that was once a fort
but now is a museum:
they like the guns
and the armour brought from
other times and countries
their drawings will be full
for some days, of swords
archaic sunburst maces
broken spears
and vivid red explosions.
the cannons
(they arenât our children)
the earthworks, noting
how they are crumbling
under the unceasing
attacks of feet and flower roots;
that were once outside
sharpening themselves on war
are now indoors
there, in the fortress,
fragile
in glass cases;
(Iâm thinking
of the careful moulding
round the stonework archways)
that is this time, such
elaborate defences keep
things that are no longer
(much)
worth defending?
game the orphan game
that says, I am alone
to play it also)
at every picture window,
against the glass, the snow
collecting on his neck,
watching the happy families
Victorian Christmas-card:
the cheap paper shows
under the pigments of
their cheerful fire-
places and satin-
ribboned
suburban laughter
and they have their own forms
of parlour
games: father and mother
playing father and mother
to be left
out by himself
in the cold
you say (with a smile fake
as a tinsel icicle):
is a lie, but also I suppose
is right, as usual:
in other seasons
outside other windows.
in the mirrors of this room
the children wheel, singing
the same song;
scruffy as dry turf,
the counterpane
rumpled with small burrows, ...