CanLit powerhouse Margaret Atwood recently released her first poetry collection in over a decade titled Dearly.
Popularly known for her novels—The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments, Alias Grace—Atwood’s newest poetry collection captures the same glimmering, sardonic humour and masterful construction that has garnered her the respect of many.
The collection is dedicated to Atwood’s late partner, Graeme Gibson, who passed away in 2019. This sense of loss and lateness is alluded to in the first poem’s title, “Late Poems,” which frames Dearly as a collection “too late, / like a love letter sent by a sailor / that arrives after he’s drowned.”
But despite this first poem’s title, the collection comes at a moment that will resonate with many as strikingly timely—both for its themes and for its very necessary lightheartedness, as Dearly‘s five sections grapple with grief, loss, and above all, an uncertain and uncanny world. Linguistically, her form reflects this; poems vary widely in length, weaving in and out of rhyme and rhythm, and shifting between enjambment and end-stops—fitting for her their dual themes of humour and dystopia, often at the same time.
I. moves from “Late Poems” to “Ghost Cat,” which seduces the reader with a pragmatically humourous account of a cat who suffers from dementia—”Cats suffer dementia too. Did you know that?”—before sinking into characteristic Atwoodian darkness, as the creator becomes the creature. It’s difficult to forget the collection’s dedication, here, as a reminder that Atwood always has at least one ulterior motive. Atwood is often funny, but she is never just funny.
An ode to Atwood’s ageing mother, “Blizzard” becomes more blatantly melancholic, though the imagery of life-full nature lifts the poem to a higher register. In these natural images, Atwood captures a mother full of life: her body is spring fern and stone, solid and strong, and still so young. The poem imagines her mother’s dreams, where “there are no more adventures for her / in the upper air, in this room.”
II. holds the most potential for controversy, as it moves toward a discussion of feminism and the feminine which, if you’ve read Atwood before, you know is coming. Atwood does not hesitate to criticize the systems and symbols she views as antiquated, but in her critiques, it is not always clear whether she stands for or against the women in question. “Shadow” and “Cassandra Considers Declining the Gift” are particularly complex in their considerations of female agency (and apparently, the danger that agency creates) and in both poems, it is unclear whether Atwood blames the victims or their assailants. While it is dangerous to assume that Atwood is victim-blaming per se, it is important to note that Atwood’s definitions and adaptions of feminism have come under fire in the past.
“Princess Clothing” levels a critique against historical aesthetic valuations of women that, at times, feels inappropriately flippant. i. sets the scene: “they’re setting a bad example, / Get out the stones.” But sometimes, Atwood too closely toes the line between the critical and the critic. ii. begins, “Once the world was nearly stripped of feathers / all in the cause of headgear,” a comment that feels highly insensitive at best, and racially charged at worst. Not to mention that “headgear” has not traditionally been exclusively feminine. The rest of the poem moves through different feminine constraints: covering hair, a historical obsession with small feet, lamentations on wool, cotton, and silk. The birds return in the final stanza: “it’s what you tope too, right? / That beyond death, there’s flight? … Oh honey, it won’t be like that. / Not quite.”
“Double-entry Sex Slug” is a relief with its playful humour (how Atwood artfully joined sex and slugs remains a mystery), and “Betrayal” opens with perhaps one of the best stanzas in the collection: “When you stumble across your lover and your friend / naked or in your bed / there are things that might be said. / Goodbye is not one of them.”
It is a wonder how one poet can collect such disparate pieces and give them such full poetic shape? How does this all make sense? It is necessary to admit that Atwood is an expert in this art. Unfortunately, intersectional feminism is the one piece of this puzzle that Atwood sometimes fails to find.
“Songs for Murdered Sisters” more seriously honours a number of women who were murdered by their partners. The set of poems (also adapted as songs) was written as part of a collaborative project with composer Jake Heggie and performer Joshua Hopkins. Hopkins originally proposed the idea as a way to honour his sister Natalie, who was murdered “by a fearful man who wanted to be taller”—the infamous line borrowed from Hopkins himself.
III. merges the human, the natural, and the supernatural in an analysis of aliens, sirens, poetry—a haunted, zombied body, or something approximating it—and spiders. “Aflame” calls the climate crisis like it is (“The world’s burning up. It always did.”), while “The Aliens Arrive” begs the question in a different way: “We like the part where we get saved. / We like the part where we get destroyed. / Why do those feel so similar?” “Update on Werewolves” first seems to be a critique of the “full-moon subversive halos” that represent the male models of success that persist even in an age widely considered progressively feminist. Atwood would likely frown at posters that say things like, “I don’t need a rich man, I am a rich man.” Luckily, this poem also serves as a more successful critique of male domination than the poems in II., in that the blame is placed firmly in the hands of the animalistic misogynist. In a turn toward the poetic, “Zombie” almost gives life to poetry—it is “the almost hand”—in a way more reminiscent of Black Mirror (“Be Right Back,” specifically) than of romantic retrospection.
IV. continues the task of “Aflame,” commenting on our treatment of “Nature” as “we sit around it, / chew it into rags / with our artful fangs and talons” (“Table Settings”). Broadly speaking, this section is full of questions. “Oh Children” desperately asks what will be left of this nature, once we finally finish wreaking havoc on the world. “Plasticene Suit” is a lamentation on some most common pollutants: petrified oil, far too many kinds of plastic, which “unlike true foliage…gives nothing back.” “Who plants it,” the poem questions, “this useless crop? / Who harvests it? Who can say Stop?” With “The Twilight of the Gods,” Atwood finally becomes weary.”Do we have goodwill? / To all mankind? / Not any more. / Did we ever?” These questions are especially poignant now, given the widely ranging responses to the pandemic-borne constraints.
But problems arise again with “Improvements on a First Line by Yeats.” “Where does it come from, this sparse taste / of ours?” as if ‘we’ have ever owned this land as ‘ours’ in the first place. To this question, colonization is one answer; nostalgia is another. The latter seems to be Atwood’s.
V. closes the collection with a focus on time—aging, loss, and love. “Mr. Lionheart” appears to be the first direct ode to Graeme Gibson, and his battle with dementia. Birds remain an enduring symbol, as in other sections, representing everything from life to death, and everything that moves between them. “Invisible Man” positions Gibson as the outline of a “truelove” that never left Atwood.
While his mind left him, these poems fill him again, or at least, bridge the spaces between his dotted lines—a symbol, perhaps, of Gibson’s loss of mind. “Flatline” appears to represent his passing; its ending, “it sounds like this:” and the flat white of the page, the poem’s too-soon end, is jarring. Saving her sentimentality for the penultimate poem, “Dearly” is Atwood’s most explicitly emotional expression: “Dearly did I wish. / Dearly did I long for. / I loved him dearly.” Old technologies, new life (and its loss) all feature here, as people become only polaroids flat and unmoving. The joining sentiment of “Dearly beloved”—a marital siren call—becomes “Dearly loved, gathered here together / in this closed drawer, / fading now, I miss you.”
With “Blackberries,” the collection ends, and past, present, and future merge. “Once this old woman / I’m conjuring for you / would have been my grandmother. / Today it’s me. / Years from now it might be you.” which demonstrates in itself why Dearly has come at exactly the right time. Is there really such thing as a late poem?
Throughout Dearly, Atwood continues to make space for all of the things that cemented her within the CanLit canon: navigating what it means to be (white and) feminine in a world that puts little value in that; pondering on the effects of climate change, merging pieces of time in a way that feels more uncanny than united (think The Handmaid’s Tale). Ultimately, fans of Atwood will love this collection, for its familiar poems, and the new which carry her spirit in full-form.
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