Poems 1965-1975 by Margaret Atwood
from Eating Fire: Selected Poetry 1965-1995,
Virago, £9.99

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Walking through a bookstore and looking for novels by Margaret Atwood, one is confronted with a score of titles – Surfacing, Cat’s Eye, The Handmaid’s Tale, The Blind Assassin and Oryx and Crake, to mention only the most prominent. Turning to the poetry shelves, the selection (as always) thins considerably. A single paperback title stands in almost all the shops: Eating Fire. As is often the case, this is not an original collection but a volume of selected poetry (1965-1995). While there’s some reason to lament the fact that a titan of twentieth-century literature like Atwood is known so preponderantly for her novels when her literary output, like those of Victor Hugo, Alessandro Manzoni and Herman Melville before her, extends well beyond that medium, one may draw consolation from the fact that her most widespread collection of verse is also excellent and representative.

Eating Fire is a small omnibus containing three different volumes – Atwood’s first and second books of selected poems (1965-75 and 1976-86), and the complete collection Morning in the Burned House. It makes for more than 350 pages of verse of an extraordinary high standard, at least as sophisticated as her work in prose, and intelligently organized in a number of different, thematically unified anthologies. The tome is an overflowing one and a single article cannot hope to do the whole thing justice. Our review shall therefore concern itself only with the first volume of Atwood’s selected poetry, originally published in 1976 under the simple title of Poems 1965-1975.

Poems brings together the efforts of six different poetry volumes and reveals a limpid thematic evolution in the author’s concerns over time. The first two collections, The Circle Game and The Animals in the Country, are the least interesting (and, unsurprisingly, also the briefest), but they highlight some of the directions Atwood will later take and some of her key interests. Michael Ondaatje, quoted on the cover of Eating Fire, compares Atwood to an ‘arsonist,’ and there is some truth to the statement. Her work is inflammatory and destructive, and the first poems reflect this. 'The Circle Game', the extensive poem which gives one of the collections its title, points to the circular and performative quality of personal interrelations (already evident in the two words of the title). The closing words, "I want the circle / broken", are more than just a reflection on the tension between our readings of (personal) history as cyclical or teleological – they become a declaration of intent for Atwood’s entire poetics.

At the heart of these poems’ anxiety is the sentiment that poetry itself takes part in this meaningless ‘circle’ – that the representation of the game is part of the game in the first place. ‘Breaking’ the circle, a rather violent image, means escaping the game, and the destabilizing quality of her verse is evident already in her use of form and grammar. The poems are not just in free verse; they make ostentatious use of signs and logograms, unorthodox punctuation (including parentheses, slashes and dashes), and arbitrary spaces and capitalization. In terms of content, ordinary lyric poetry is very difficult to find – there is not a single piece, for instance, which you could call a love poem in the classical sense. The closest you get to such a thing in the first two collections would be 'More and More', which – in the poem’s own words – is more of a "fair warning" to the lover than an expression of desire, and where the discourse of love is treated with tones at the very least dry ("There is no reason for this, only / a starved dog’s logic about bones").

While there are some gems in the first collections, the overall execution is less confident than in the later volumes. Atwood is clearly struggling to escape the circularity of linguistic representations, and some of the tropes fall flat in the process (her comparison of a flock of birds to a ‘flight of words’ in Pebbles, for instance, is rather banal). By the time one reaches Procedures from the Underground, the fourth collection, her stylistic pulse is remarkably more confident.

The third collection, The Journals of Susanna Moodie, stands alone as a fascinating midway between a book of poems and a novel. The poems are fictive, though Susanna Moodie was a real Canadian writer, and they recount her life from her disembarking at Quebec in 1832 to her death – and beyond, as her ‘Thoughts from Underground’ offer a post-mortem commentary on twentieth-century Canadian society. Commentary on the Journals has usually focused on the historical and cultural substance, of course, but the poems are at least as interesting for their purely formal qualities. Placed in context of the rest of her verse, they are a natural continuation of Atwood’s compulsion to question the literary structures and forms which she employs even as she employs them, and they represent perhaps her most radical departure from traditional story-telling. The chronicle of Moodie’s life, narrated through successive meditations (often surreal or esoteric in their nature) rather than through a stream of events, is potentially divisive if it is read as a questioning of novelistic narrative but indisputably refreshing on these same terms. It sets itself apart from the rest of the volume and, more so than any of these other books, would best be served by an article of its own (ideally by a Canadian author, or someone familiar with Canadian culture and concerns).

The last two collections in the volume, Power Politics and You Are Happy, give us Atwood at her most mature and are without doubt the most satisfying. They deserve a paragraph each.

Power Politics is, in this writer’s opinion, the finest anthology in the volume. It successfully stages and resolves all the conflicts of postmodern identity introduced in The Circle Game. The form is free and chaotic, but consistent across the collection. The poems take us through a series of reflections, often frightfully incisive, on the instability of identity (or representations of identity) in the circus of signs that society is composed of – including poetry, of course. They also question and explore how our faculty of expression can be true to such a genuine or artificial self. The terms on which (our) identity must mediate with the signs around it are always those of economy and, in a primal sense of the expression, power politics. We may call them the economy and politics of language, where love, truth and justice are employed as its weapons – weapons which we arm ourselves with or defend ourselves against in our relationship with other people. The capacity of the speaker to transcend these formal clichés (to ‘break the circle’) and offer a fresh perspective which, like the rest of her poetics, seems anything but conventional in the canons of lyric poetry, makes the compositions striking and original. The imagery is extraordinary – visceral without being crude, urban without being mundane, austere without being cynical, and simultaneously realistic and dreamy. Power Politics is an utterly explosive cocktail, ferociously exuberant, successfully synthetic and more lacerating than anything ever written by this author.

Finally, the polemically titled You Are Happy closes this selection and confirms Atwood’s talent as a lively and mercurial poet. By comparison with Power Politics, it is less cogent but more variegated and playful. The themes chosen are very heterogeneous and the (in)formal aggression is brought to its zenith – several of these compositions are prose poems, small self-standing paragraphs of inner speech which are not even given a title. Provided that one is not a formalist puritan (assuming that such a thing still exists in the current poetic scene), there is some real entertainment to be drawn from the colourful assortment of themes that Atwood brings together. Her ‘Songs’ on various countryside animals (the fox, the bull, the worms, the pig) may sound familiar to readers of Marianne Moore or Ted Hughes, but the superficial impression gives way very quickly – Atwood’s anarchic metaphors provide a treatment of the subject which is quite unprecedented, and which allows for a remarkably smooth transition when the songs start shifting to less conventional characters ('Siren Song' or the 'Corpse Song', for example). There are also the numerous 'Circe / Mud Poems', which see Atwood engaging with myth three decades before the writing of The Penelopiad and fully demonstrating the kind of maturity, confidence and acumen that were only incipient in The Circle Game and The Animals in the Country.

Atwood’s work as a poet raises an important question on the role of poetry within discourse – whether we choose to see (and write and read) verse as a constitutive or destructive act. Or, to put it differently, whether the act of writing poetry is fundamentally foundational or critical in its nature. Obviously the two categories are not mutually exclusive and there is space for both types of poetry in any literary scene. And Atwood would be the first to warn us against adopting such a dichotomy as a universal or ultimate reading key for all verse (some of her own work, such as the Journals, has constitutive aspects as well). But the joyful bombing of established institutions such as society’s discourses on love, history and art, as well as those of poetry and language in general, is so powerful in Poems 1965-1975 that one can almost hear the temples crumbling. In this sense, Atwood’s poetry is very different from her prose, which is more orthodox and frequently less subtle – and this may be the greatest ignis fatuus in the fact that her novels are so much more famous; they only show the ‘positive’ Atwood, the Atwood with the clearer rhetorical registers and the political and social activism, the Atwood who is adolescent-friendly, the Atwood of cosmetic prose and lulling narratives, of the careful architecture drawn by characters around their story. The Erynie, the roar from the underworld, the beast of destruction is all in the poems – and it is ever so much more caustic.

The irony of Atwood’s selection of a title as simple as Poems is that the word ‘poetry’ originally derives from ‘creating.’ So her title means ‘Acts of creation,’ but there is undoubtedly an element in her practice which destroys as well – destroys, and steamrolls, and puts to the torch, and does this all without the slightest hint of mercy. Whether this, or the more ‘creative’ verse, is the kind of poetry you prefer will be for you to say. Whether anyone did it better than Margaret ‘Attila’ Atwood in the last century, probably not many.

Andrea T Judge