Morning in the Burned House

by Margaret Atwood

Overview

The renowned poet and author of The Handmaid’s Tale “brings a swift, powerful energy” to this “intimate and immediate” poetry collection (Publishers Weekly).

These beautifully crafted poems, by turns dark, playful, intensely moving, tender, and intimate, are some of Margaret Atwood’s most accomplished and versatile works. Some draw on history and some on myth, both classical and popular. Others, more personal, concern themselves with love, with the fragility of the natural world, and with death. Generous, searing, compassionate, and disturbing, this poetry rises out of human experience to seek a level between luminous memory and the realities of the everyday, between the capacity to inflict and the strength to forgive.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780395825211
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	09/05/2023
Series:	Edition 001 Series
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	144
Sales rank:	370,122
Product dimensions:	5.38(w) x 7.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

Margaret Atwood, whose work has been published in more than forty-five countries, is the author of over fifty books, including fiction, poetry, critical essays, and graphic novels. In addition to The Handmaid’s Tale, now an award-winning television series, her works 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; Hag-Seed; The Testaments, which won the Booker Prize and was long-listed for the Giller Prize; and the poetry collection Dearly. 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 her services to literature. 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

Read an Excerpt

THE MOMENT

The moment when, after many years of hard work and a long voyage you stand in the centre of your room,
house, half-acre, square mile, island, country,
knowing at last how you got there,
and say, I own this,

is the same moment the trees unloose their soft arms from around you,
the birds take back their language,
the cliffs fissure and collapse,
the air moves back from you like a wave and you can’t breathe.
S
No, they whisper. You own nothing.
You were a visitor, time after time climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming.
We never belonged to you.
You never found us.
It was always the other way round.

Editorial Reviews

"Intimate and immediate." — Publishers Weekly

“The vein of grieving that moves through this book like a dark tracer runs purest in a series of elegiac poems about the death of the poet’s father.”  — Tom Clark, San Francisco Chronicle

“Atwood’s savage, back-talking monologues have become her trademark…Her range is darkened and deepened with a series of elegiac poems about her dying father, and she, the speaker, the daughter, faces the inevitable fall into the future from which her wit and magic can’t save her. We know Atwood is a prolific novelist. Remember also her poetic voice.”  — Molly Bendall, The Antioch Review

From the Publisher