Dearly: New Poems

by Margaret Atwood

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

We not only love the way Margaret Atwood sees the world, we also love the way she describes the world. From sensuality in nature to growing older (which, in Atwood's world is OK for the faint of heart and memories of the past), the poems in Dearly display a sensitive understanding of the human condition with just the right amount of humor peppered throughout. It's a joy to move through this collection; to understand the change of seasons and the wonderful world that surrounds us.

A new book of poetry from internationally acclaimed, award-winning and bestselling author Margaret Atwood

In Dearly, Margaret Atwood’s first collection of poetry in over a decade, Atwood addresses themes such as love, loss, the passage of time, the nature of nature and - zombies. Her new poetry is introspective and personal in tone, but wide-ranging in topic. In poem after poem, she casts her unique imagination and unyielding, observant eye over the landscape of a life carefully and intuitively lived.

While many are familiar with Margaret Atwood’s fiction—including her groundbreaking and bestselling novels The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments, Oryx and Crake, among others—she has, from the beginning of her career, been one of our most significant contemporary poets. And she is one of the very few writers equally accomplished in fiction and poetry.  This collection is a stunning achievement that will be appreciated by fans of her novels and poetry readers alike.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781799944645
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	11/10/2020
Sales rank:	976,352
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 5.70(h) x (d)

About the Author

Margaret Atwood, whose work has been published in more than forty-five countries, is the author of more than fifty books of fiction, poetry, critical essays, and graphic novels. In addition to The Handmaid’s Tale, now an award-winning TV series, her novels include Cat’s Eye, short-listed for the 1989 Booker Prize; Alias Grace, which won the Giller Prize in Canada and the Premio Mondello in Italy; The Blind Assassin, winner of the 2000 Booker Prize; The MaddAddam Trilogy; The Heart Goes Last; and Hag-Seed. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the Franz Kafka International Literary Prize, the PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Los Angeles Times Innovator’s Award. In 2019 she was made a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour in Great Britain for services to literature and her novel The Testaments won the Booker Prize and was longlisted for The Giller Prize. She lives in Toronto.

Hometown:

Toronto, Ontario

Date of Birth:

November 18, 1939

Place of Birth:

Ottawa, Ontario

Education:

B.A., University of Toronto, 1961; M.A. Radcliffe, 1962; Ph.D., Harvard University, 1967

Website:

http://www.owtoad.com

Table of Contents

I

Late Poems 3

Ghost Cat 4

Salt 5

Passports 6

Blizzard 7

Coconut 9

Souvenirs 10

The Tin Woodwoman Gets a Massage 12

If There Were No Emptiness 13

II

Health Class (1953) 17

A Genre Painting 18

Princess Clothing 19

Cicadas 22

Double-Entry Slug Sex 23

Everyone Else's Sex Life 25

Betrayal 27

Frida Kahlo, San Miguel, Ash Wednesday 28

Cassandra Considers Declining the Gift 30

Shadow 31

Songs for Murdered Sisters 32

1 Empty Chair

2 Enchantment

3 Anger

4 Dream

5 Bird Soul

6 Lost

7 Rage

Coda: Song

The Dear Ones 40

Digging Up the Scythians 42

III

September Mushrooms 47

Carving the Jacks 49

A Drone Scans the Wreckage 50

Aflame 52

Update on Werewolves 54

Zombie 56

The Aliens Arrive 58

Siren Brooding on Her Eggs 62

Spider Signatures 64

At the Translation Conference 66

IV

Walking in the Madman's Wood 71

Feather 73

Fatal Light Awareness 74

Fear of Birds 75

Short Takes on Wolves 76

Table Settings 78

Improvisation on a First Line by Yeats 79

"Heart of the Arctic" 80

Plasticene Suite 83

1 Rock-like Object on Beach

2 Faint Hopes

3 Foliage

4 Midway Island Albatross

5 Editorial Notes

6 Sorcerer's Apprentice

7 Whales

8 Little Robot

9 The Bright Side

Tracking the Rain 95

Oh Children 97

The Twilight of the Gods 98

This Fiord Looks Like a Lake 100

V

One Day 103

Sad Utensils 105

Winter Vacations 106

Hay foot 108

Mr. Lionheart 110

Invisible Man 111

Silver Slippers 112

Within 114

Flatline 115

Disenchanted Corpse 117

Dearly 118

Blackberries 121

Acknowledgements 123

Editorial Reviews

★ 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.)

Publishers Weekly

"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

"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

"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

"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

"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

"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

Margaret Atwood deserves an adjective - Atwoodian - in recognition of her virtuoso wit and unmistakeable style.”

Chicago Tribune

Margaret Atwood deserves an adjective - Atwoodian - in recognition of her virtuoso wit and unmistakeable style.”

Chicago Tribune

"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

★ 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

Library Journal

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