Paper boat New and selected poems, 1961-2023

This darkly ravishing voyage through six decades of Atwood's poetry launches with Double Persephone. A slender volume she and a poet friend handset and printed themselves, it seeds key themes and inquiries Atwood has pursued with imagination, depth, finesse, wit, and fire ever since. In the dozen books represented here along with uncollected and new poems, she interrogates classical myths and archetypes and reveals hidden dimensions of nature, landscapes, women's lives, history, life's cycles, love, and death. A clear-eyed observer of humans struggling in the grip of mysterious forces greater than our own even as we decimate the planet, Atwood is a scientifically precise and discerning ecological poet, at times writing from the perspectives of animals, and a shrewd and caustic protester against misogyny, racism, social injustice, and war. Fiercely forthright, she ventures into the macabre, dissects the wounds of love gone wrong, and charts tides of joy and grief. Atwood's poems are incubators for her fiction, as with The Journals of Susanna Moodie, based on the life and writings of a nineteenth-century English immigrant to the wilds of Upper Canada, which echoes in Alias Grace. Trenchant, poignant, archly funny, lacerating, and formally fluent, Atwood's incandescent poems address the timeless and the now, the wild and the cultivated, the radiant and the tragic. A prodigious literary treasure.

The iconic Atwood (Dearly) has produced nearly as many volumes of poetry as fiction. Here, she creates a grand showcase of verse selected from more than a dozen collections and includes about two dozen uncollected poems. The result is classic Atwood--conversational, nearly insouciant, yet with a fierceness of perception and conviction that cuts to the bone--and though her style may have loosened up somewhat along the way, it seems to have emerged whole early on. So have her themes, both topical (a concern for women's issues, animal rights, and the consequences of white settlement and warfare, for example) and personal, with the inevitable wrap-up of life toward the end ("We can't even kill our previous selves"). Mythology and folktale often shape the narratives, which display both a novelist's flare for scenario and a poet's flare for distillation. Though the work is massive, selections from each of her past poetry collections tell a clear story; those from Power Politics, for instance, probe relationships ("you fit into me / like a hook into an eye // a fish hook / an open eye"). And despite the seriousness of intent, Atwood can be funny ("Nothing but baritones will do. / I've had it with tenors"). VERDICT Essential for any serious poetry collection.--Barbara Hoffert