Atwood's Poetry Focuses on a Home

Margaret Atwood has often observed that Canadians like herself are all imigrants, outsiders in their own country. "We move in fear," she writes in The Journals of Susanne Moodie, "exiles and invaders." This obsession with the precarious nature of lives lived in a world that is not our own pervades much of her work. The feeling is particularly strong in her newest collection of poetry, Morning in the Burned House.

"You come back into the room/where you've been living/all along," declares the displaced narrator of the collection's first poem, "You Come Back." Her seemingly simple question, "What been going on while I was away?" could easily apply to the author herself who, after a prolific decade spent writing novels and short stories, has returned to the politics or, perhaps, anti-politics of poetry. Reading these latest poems, one starts to miss Atwood-the-novelist a little bit. The author's brilliance still lies in her prose, and the new book is not a landmark like Cat's Eye or The Robber Bride. Nevertheless, Morning in the Burned House is solid and thoughtful, an inventive re-working of familiar Atwood themes. It also accomplishes what has become increasingly difficult in an age of obscure poetry: In a spare, often stacatto language, Atwood themes. It also accomplishes what has become increasingly difficult in an age of obscure poetry: In a spare, often stacatto language. Atwood resurrects the simple beauty of the poetic form.

Life and middle age, Atwood's characters realize in part one of Morning in the Burned House, have become a kind of ghost town from which they can't--and don't necessarily want-to escape. God isn't exactly dead, but He seems to be on permanent leave. One is reminded of Geoffrey Hill's pithy "Ovid in the Third Reich": "God is distant, difficult/Things happen."

As the book's title suggests, the home itself serves as an accessible metaphor for this sense of existiential and philosohpical exhaustion. In one poem, a woman, or rather, Atwood's ubiquitous, unnamed "you" character, wanders around her kitchen at 2:30 a.m., engaging in a refreshingly unpretentious bit of meditation:

You say, The sensed absence of God and the sensed presence amount to much the same thing, only in reverse....

Several hundred years ago this could have been mysticism or heresy. It isn't now. Outside there are sirens. Someone's been run over. The century grinds on. ("In the Secular Night")

In the book's second section, Atwood looks outward to mythology, both ancient (Helen of Troy, Troilus and Cressida) and contemporary (Ava Gardner), often weighing in with satirical observations about sexual politics. In "Miss July Grows Older," another version of the modern myth, an aging pin-up girl comes to represent sexual charlatanry of all kinds ("Men were a skill," "Don't get me wrong: with the lights out/I'd still take on anyone"). The narrative voice is reminiscent of the prickly teenage heroine of Cat's Eye:

When I was young I went with my hair

hiding one eye, thinking myself daring...

left lipstick imprints the shape of grateful rub bery

sighs on the cigarettes of men I hardly knew and didn't what to.

Atwood has been rather shallowly labelled a feminist writer (and a "radical" one at that), but Morning in the Burned House reveals an authorial voice that is far more complex. Make no mistake, Atwood's voice is, and always has been, undeniably female. Although she has retreated some from the stance of her now famous epigram "you fit into me/like a hook into an eye/a fish hook/an open eye," the idea of Atwood-as-radical is still strong. But Atwood also understands instinctually the difference between politically-charged writing and propaganda.

In her poetry, Atwood manages to avoid the sentimental preachiness so evident in an openly feminist writer such as Marge Piercy. Part three of Morning in the Burned House takes up explicitly feminist and female concerns, but Atwood's transition between the personal and the political is seamless, maintaining a crucial, delicate balance.

Atwood saves herself from the feminist/political trap because as an artist, she remains fascinated by subversiveness, avoiding a man-evil, woman-good dichotomy. The poet is interested, instead, in the duality of the individual, and especially the female, self. She articulates this well in "The Loneliness of the Military Historian," describing a female scholar's fascination with the "masculine" art of war:

A swift cut to the horse's neck and a hunk of armor crashes down like a tower. Fire against metal. A poet might say: romance against banality. When awake, I know better.

Toward the end of the book, Atwood finds the spectre of death looming ever closer, though without the hope of salvation such as Mary Webster's. Part four is a series of poems written for a dying parent. In one scene, a woman tries to remember her father through a series of dream images, each proving elusive and unsatisfactory. In another scene, Shakespearean tragedy undergoes a reversal that is anything but, as a Lear figure finds himself watching terrible television in nursing home.

Atwood offers the reader little real solace through these confrontations with death. She retreats instead to the realm of imagination. The speaker in "Morning in the Burned House," the final poem in the collection, revels in the bizarre, hallucinatory state between life and death, imagined as a peaceful yet disquieting domestic scene:

In the burned house, I am eating breakfast.

You understand: there is no house; there is no breakfast, yet here I am.

The spoon which was melted scrapes against the bowl which was melted also. No one else is around.

Where have they gone to, my brother and sister, mother and father? Off along the shore, perhaps.

This striking poem is the final realization of the book's rather cryptic title. In the end, the poet is left only with the "burned house" of her own, singular body, "holding my cindery, non-existent/radiant flesh. Incandescent.

In her poetry, Atwood manages to avoid the sentimental preachiness so evident in an openly feminist writer such as Marge Piercy. Part three of Morning in the Burned House takes up explicitly feminist and female concerns, but Atwood's transition between the personal and the political is seamless, maintaining a crucial, delicate balance.

Atwood saves herself from the feminist/political trap because as an artist, she remains fascinated by subversiveness, avoiding a man-evil, woman-good dichotomy. The poet is interested, instead, in the duality of the individual, and especially the female, self. She articulates this well in "The Loneliness of the Military Historian," describing a female scholar's fascination with the "masculine" art of war:

A swift cut to the horse's neck and a hunk of armor crashes down like a tower. Fire against metal. A poet might say: romance against banality. When awake, I know better.

Toward the end of the book, Atwood finds the spectre of death looming ever closer, though without the hope of salvation such as Mary Webster's. Part four is a series of poems written for a dying parent. In one scene, a woman tries to remember her father through a series of dream images, each proving elusive and unsatisfactory. In another scene, Shakespearean tragedy undergoes a reversal that is anything but, as a Lear figure finds himself watching terrible television in nursing home.

Atwood offers the reader little real solace through these confrontations with death. She retreats instead to the realm of imagination. The speaker in "Morning in the Burned House," the final poem in the collection, revels in the bizarre, hallucinatory state between life and death, imagined as a peaceful yet disquieting domestic scene:

In the burned house, I am eating breakfast.

You understand: there is no house; there is no breakfast, yet here I am.

The spoon which was melted scrapes against the bowl which was melted also. No one else is around.

Where have they gone to, my brother and sister, mother and father? Off along the shore, perhaps.

This striking poem is the final realization of the book's rather cryptic title. In the end, the poet is left only with the "burned house" of her own, singular body, "holding my cindery, non-existent/radiant flesh. Incandescent.