OCTOBER 2020 - AudioFile
Margaret Atwood is best known as a novelist, of course, but she is also quite a fine poet, and her reading of her poems is also quite fine. The poems focus largely on nature and the nature of being a woman in the modern world, but these potentially fraught subjects do not tempt Atwood, in writing or reading, into stridency. Her performance throughout the collection is low-key, although there is no mistaking her intentions and her passions. Just as good poetry rewards multiple readings (and this is good poetry), good readings of poetry deserve, and reward, multiple listenings. This is that kind of poetry, and that kind of reading. D.M.H. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine
Publishers Weekly
★ 11/16/2020
Atwood (The Testaments) returns with a sardonic and sagacious masterpiece to add to her significant oeuvre. Fantasy, love, sex, feminism, and mortality are explored with discursive poise and narrative cohesion. Atwood has a knack for creating piquant emotional textures, infusing ideas, experiences, and objects with palpable life, as when she envisions the negative space that will remain after the death of her partner: “That’s who is waiting for me:/ an invisible man/ defined by a dotted line:// the shape of an absence/ in your place at the table,// ...a rustling of the fallen leaves,/ a slight thickening of the air.” Time is perhaps the most ubiquitous variable in her poems; Atwood fuses past and present, resulting in prescient nostalgia for the current moment and for the future. But there is hope here, too, in spaces created by voids. In “If There Were No Emptiness,” she writes: “That room has been static for me so long:/ an emptiness a void a silence/ containing an unheard story/ ready for me to unlock.// Let there be plot.” Combining dignified vulnerability, lyrical whimsy, and staunch realism, Atwood offers a memorable collection that emboldens readers to welcome disillusionment. (Nov.)
From the Publisher
"Aging, rituals, and the environment are a few topics [Atwood] spins her magic yarn around in this structurally creative, soulfully stirring slim tome. . . . We need [Atwood], now." — Good Morning America
“Margaret Atwood deserves an adjective - Atwoodian - in recognition of her virtuoso wit and unmistakeable style.” — Chicago Tribune
"Atwood’s new book—her first collection of poems in over a decade—is a good reminder of her mastery of the craft. In Dearly, Atwood’s inspirations run the gamut from the intoxicating pleasures of nature to the fantastical goings-on of zombies, but the themes are grounded in the familiar: love, loss, desire and the inevitability of time passing. Atwood blurs the lines of what we know and asks us instead to give credence to what we feel." — Time
"It is sometimes debated whether every great novelist must first be a great poet. If you look at the likes of poets-turned-novelists like Jesse Ball or Denis Johnson, you might be inclined to agree. Don’t forget Margaret Atwood, who began publishing poetry in the early-1960s, self-publishing her first collection, Double Persephone, in 1961. Her latest poems collected in Dearly include melancholy meditations on life and death and the gender of werewolves." — Wall Street Journal
"For the first time in more than a decade, Atwood — an accomplished poet, though best known for “The Handmaid’s Tale,” among other novels — is releasing a wide-ranging new collection of poetry. It’s hauntingly beautiful, with reflections on life and death, time and change, and nature and zombies. The strong imagery and atmosphere will probably hook even those who had only been familiar with Atwood’s fiction." — Washington Post
"Atwood’s flare for precise metaphor in no way softens her delivery. . . . Combining the wit of Dorothy Parker with the wisdom of Emily Dickinson, Atwood adds a steely grace and richness of her own. If there is beauty in despair, one may find it here." — Library Journal (starred review)
"Atwood’s first books were poetry collections; decades later, she infuses her newest poems with the flinty wit and surefire lucidity readers cherish in her best-selling, influential fiction, including The Testaments. Spiked with surprising juxtapositions and wily delight in language, at times mordant, frequently hilarious, and always unflinching." — Booklist
"The soaring quality of the verse itself . . . [is] always illuminated by characteristic flashes of brilliance and wit, and powered by a pure force of creative energy. . . . Atwood's poetry is vibrant with purpose, brilliant, hard-edged, and instantly legible; and they will doubtless become classics of our troubled time." — The Scotsman
"Atwood... returns with a sardonic and sagacious masterpiece to add to her significant oeuvre...Atwood has a knack for creating piquant emotional textures, infusing ideas, experiences, and objects with palpable life...Combining dignified vulnerability, lyrical whimsy, and staunch realism, Atwood offers a memorable collection that emboldens readers to welcome disillusionment." — Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Here we see Atwood at the height of her poetic powers...The more Atwood wields specifics, the more of the world she skewers with her fantastically sharp imagination." — New York Times Book Review
Time
"Atwood’s new book—her first collection of poems in over a decade—is a good reminder of her mastery of the craft. In Dearly, Atwood’s inspirations run the gamut from the intoxicating pleasures of nature to the fantastical goings-on of zombies, but the themes are grounded in the familiar: love, loss, desire and the inevitability of time passing. Atwood blurs the lines of what we know and asks us instead to give credence to what we feel."
Chicago Tribune
Margaret Atwood deserves an adjective - Atwoodian - in recognition of her virtuoso wit and unmistakeable style.”
Washington Post
"For the first time in more than a decade, Atwood — an accomplished poet, though best known for “The Handmaid’s Tale,” among other novels — is releasing a wide-ranging new collection of poetry. It’s hauntingly beautiful, with reflections on life and death, time and change, and nature and zombies. The strong imagery and atmosphere will probably hook even those who had only been familiar with Atwood’s fiction."
New York Times Book Review
"Here we see Atwood at the height of her poetic powers...The more Atwood wields specifics, the more of the world she skewers with her fantastically sharp imagination."
Wall Street Journal
"It is sometimes debated whether every great novelist must first be a great poet. If you look at the likes of poets-turned-novelists like Jesse Ball or Denis Johnson, you might be inclined to agree. Don’t forget Margaret Atwood, who began publishing poetry in the early-1960s, self-publishing her first collection, Double Persephone, in 1961. Her latest poems collected in Dearly include melancholy meditations on life and death and the gender of werewolves."
The Scotsman
"The soaring quality of the verse itself . . . [is] always illuminated by characteristic flashes of brilliance and wit, and powered by a pure force of creative energy. . . . Atwood's poetry is vibrant with purpose, brilliant, hard-edged, and instantly legible; and they will doubtless become classics of our troubled time."
Booklist
"Atwood’s first books were poetry collections; decades later, she infuses her newest poems with the flinty wit and surefire lucidity readers cherish in her best-selling, influential fiction, including The Testaments. Spiked with surprising juxtapositions and wily delight in language, at times mordant, frequently hilarious, and always unflinching."
Good Morning America
"Aging, rituals, and the environment are a few topics [Atwood] spins her magic yarn around in this structurally creative, soulfully stirring slim tome. . . . We need [Atwood], now."
Wall Street Journal
"It is sometimes debated whether every great novelist must first be a great poet. If you look at the likes of poets-turned-novelists like Jesse Ball or Denis Johnson, you might be inclined to agree. Don’t forget Margaret Atwood, who began publishing poetry in the early-1960s, self-publishing her first collection, Double Persephone, in 1961. Her latest poems collected in Dearly include melancholy meditations on life and death and the gender of werewolves."
Chicago Tribune
Margaret Atwood deserves an adjective - Atwoodian - in recognition of her virtuoso wit and unmistakeable style.”
Library Journal
★ 11/01/2020
Elegiac yet cautionary, Atwood's first new collection since 2007's The Door revolves around themes of mortality, environmental jeopardy, memory, feminism, and loss. These carefully tuned lyric poems, many lightly rhymed, often bear bitter witness to humankind's self-destructive treatment of both planet ("Whatever we touch turns red") and spirit ("we don't have minds/ as such these days, but tiny snarls/ of firefly neural pathways/ signalling no/yes/no"). A lifelong activist, Atwood nicknames our geologic age The Plasticine, characterized by a civilization "spewing out mountains of whatnot," filling oceans with a "neo-seaweed/ of torn bags, cast wrappers, tangled rope/ shredded by tides and rocks." The final section of poems, haunted by "the shape of an absence," are poignant with the memory of novelist Graeme Gibson, her partner for nearly a half-century who passed in 2019. VERDICT Atwood's flare for precise metaphor in no way softens her delivery, as when she observes "We are a dying symphony." Combining the wit of Dorothy Parker with the wisdom of Emily Dickinson, Atwood adds a steely grace and richness all her own. If there is beauty in despair, one may find it here.—Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY
OCTOBER 2020 - AudioFile
Margaret Atwood is best known as a novelist, of course, but she is also quite a fine poet, and her reading of her poems is also quite fine. The poems focus largely on nature and the nature of being a woman in the modern world, but these potentially fraught subjects do not tempt Atwood, in writing or reading, into stridency. Her performance throughout the collection is low-key, although there is no mistaking her intentions and her passions. Just as good poetry rewards multiple readings (and this is good poetry), good readings of poetry deserve, and reward, multiple listenings. This is that kind of poetry, and that kind of reading. D.M.H. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine
