Selected Poems 2

1976 - 1986

Margaret Atwood

• Publisher: Ecco
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780395454060
• eBook ISBN: 9780544147010
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Essays
• Index: Literature

Selected Poems 2 is an essential collection from the critically acclaimed, bestselling author Margaret Atwood, tracing her work from 1976-1986.

Celebrated as a major novelist throughout the English-speaking world, Margaret Atwood is also one of our most significant contemporary poets. Selected Poems 2 presents her work in the decade following 1976—important years of change and new themes in her poetry. It includes selections from Two-Headed Poems (1978), True Stories (1981), Interlunar (1984), and prose poems from Murder in the Dark (1983). As in her fiction, Atwood ruminates on oppression and injustice and on the genders and their discontents, but beyond these surface dissonances we hear the music of compassion and fellowship and love. “Marked by an unflinching inspection of the world” (New York Times Book Review), Selected Poems 2 contains some of Atwood’s most extraordinary writing and is sure to captivate readers for years to come.

Orpheus (1)

You walked in front of me,
pulling me back out
to the green light that had once
grown fangs and killed me.

 

I was obedient, but
numb, like an arm
gone to sleep; the return
to time was not my choice.

 

By then I was used to silence.
Though something stretched between us
like a whisper, like a rope:
my former name,
drawn tight.
You had your old leash
with you, love you might call it,
and your flesh voice.

 

Before your eyes you held steady
the image of what you wanted
me to become: living again.
It was this hope of yours that kept me following.

 

I was your hallucination, listening
and floral, and you were singing me:
already new skin was forming on me
within the luminous misty shroud
of my other body; already
there was dirt on my hands and I was thirsty.

 

I could see only the outline
of your head and shoulders,
black against the cave mouth,
and so could not see your face
at all, when you turned

 

and called to me because you had
already lost me. The last
I saw of you was a dark oval.
Though I knew how this failure
would hurt you, I had to
fold like a gray moth and let go.

 

You could not believe I was more than your echo.

Eurydice

He is here, come down to look for you.
It is the song that calls you back,
a song of joy and suffering
equally: a promise:
that things will be different up there
than they were last time.

 

You would rather have gone on feeling nothing,
emptiness and silence; the stagnant peace
of the deepest sea, which is easier
than the noise and flesh of the surface.

 

You are used to these blanched dim corridors,
you are used to the king
who passes you without speaking.

 

The other one is different
and you almost remember him.
He says he is singing to you
because he loves you,

 

not as you are now,
so chilled and minimal: moving and still
both, like a white curtain blowing
in the draft from a half-opened window
beside a chair on which nobody sits.

 

He wants you to be what he calls real.
He wants you to stop light.
He wants to feel himself thickening
like a treetrunk or a haunch
and see blood on his eyelids
when he closes them, and the sun beating.

 

This love of his is not something
he can do if you aren't there,
but what you knew suddenly as you left your body
cooling and whitening on the lawn

 

was that you love him anywhere,
even in this land of no memory,
even in this domain of hunger.
You hold love in your hand, a red seed
you had forgotten you were holding.

 

He has come almost too far.
He cannot believe without seeing,
and it's dark here.
Go back, you whisper,

 

but he wants to be fed again
by you. O handful of gauze, little
bandage, handful of cold
air, it is not through him
you will get your freedom.

The Robber Bridegroom

He would like not to kill. He would like
what he imagines other men have,
instead of this red compulsion. Why do the women
fail him and die badly? He would like to kill them gently,
finger by finger and with great tenderness, so that
at the end they would melt into him
with gratitude for his skill and the final pleasure
he still believes he could bring them
if only they would accept him,
but they scream too much and make him angry.
Then he goes for the soul, rummaging
in their flesh for it, despotic with self-pity,
hunting among the nerves and the shards
of their faces for the one thing
he needs to live, and lost
back there in the poplar and spruce forest
in the watery moonlight, where his young bride,
pale but only a little frightened,
her hands glimmering with his own approaching
death, gropes her way towards him
along the obscure path, from white stone
to white stone, ignorant and singing,
dreaming of him as he is.

Letter from Persephone

This is for the left-handed mothers
in their fringed black shawls or flowered housecoats
of the 'forties, their pink mule slippers,
their fingers, painted red or splay-knuckled
that played the piano formerly.

 

I know about your houseplants
that always died, about your spread
thighs roped down and split
between, and afterwards
that struggle of amputees
under a hospital sheet that passed
for sex and was never mentioned,
your invalid mothers, your boredom,
the enraged sheen of your floors;
I know about your fathers
who wanted sons.

 

These are the sons
you pronounced with your bodies,
the only words you could
be expected to say,
these flesh stutters.

 

No wonder this one
is nearly mute, flinches when touched,
is afraid of caves
and this one threw himself at a train
so he could feel his own heartbeat
once anyway; and this one
touched his own baby gently
he thought, and it came undone;
and this one enters the trussed bodies
of women as if spitting.

 

I know you cry at night
and they do, and they are looking for you.

 

They wash up here, I get
this piece or that. It's a blood
puzzle.

 

It's not your fault
either, but I can't fix it.

No Name

This is the nightmare you now have frequently:
that a man will come to your house at evening
with a hole in him—you place it
in the chest, on the left side—and blood leaking out
onto the wooden door as he leans against it.

He is a man in the act of vanishing
one way or another.
He wants you to let him in.
He is like the soul of a dead
lover, come back to the surface of the earth
because he did not have enough of it and is still hungry

but he is far from dead. Though the hair
lifts on your arms ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Copyright
• From TWO-HEADED POEMS (1978)
• A Paper Bag
• The Woman Who Could Not Live With Her Faulty Heart
• Five Poems for Dolls
• Five Poems for Grandmothers
• Marrying the Hangman
• Four Small Elegies
• Two-Headed Poems
• The Bus to Alliston, Ontario
• The Woman Makes Peace With Her Faulty Heart
• Solstice Poem
• Marsh, Hawk
• A Red Shirt
• Night Poem
• All Bread
• You Begin
• From TRUE STORIES (1981)
• True Stories
• Landcrab I
• Landcrab II
• Postcard
• Nothing
• From NOTES TOWARDS A POEM THAT CAN NEVER BE WRITTEN
• A Conversation
• Flying Inside Your Own Body
• Torture
• A Women's Issue
• Christmas Carols
• Notes Towards a Poem that Can Never Be Written
• Vultures
• Sunset II
• Variation on the Word Sleep
• Mushrooms
• Out
• Blue Dwarfs
• Last Day
• From INTERLUNAR (1984)
• From SNAKE POEMS
• Snake Woman
• Bad Mouth
• Eating Snake
• Metempsychosis
• Psalm to Snake
• Quattrocento
• After Heraclitus
• From INTERLUNAR
• Bedside
• Precognition
• Keep
• Anchorage
• Georgia Beach
• A Sunday Drive
• Orpheus (1)
• Eurydice
• The Robber Bridegroom
• Letter from Persephone
• No Name
• Orpheus (2)
• The Words Continue Their Journey
• Heart Test With an Echo Chamber
• A Boat
• Interlunar
• NEW POEMS (1985–1986)
• Aging Female Poet Sits on the Balcony
• Porcupine Tree
• Aging Female Poet Reads Little Magazines
• Porcupine Meditation
• Aging Female Poet on Laundry Day
• Nightshade on the Way to School
• Mothers
• She
• Werewolf Movies
• How to Tell One Country From Another
• Machine. Gun. Nest.
• The Rest
• Another Elegy
• Galiano Coast: Four Entrances
• Squaw Lilies: Some Notes
• Three Praises
• Not the Moon
• About the Author