Whatever happened to Atwood?

Dearly

Margaret Atwood Mcclelland & Stewart

There's an old green paperback I've carried around for years. A strapline on the cover boasts that is a guide to “the new boundaries of contemporary poetry.” The title is more modest: Poets of Contemporary Canada, 1960-1970. It's full of young upstarts — Michael Ondaatje, Leonard Cohen and another poet who scared the editors witless: they called her work “jagged” and “terrifying.”

This poet wrote that her mind “grope(d) nervous/ tentacles in the night.” Like T.S. Eliot, she saw the skull beneath the skin. Her sawn-off line-endings were cliffs from which an unwary reader might fall.

Her name was Margaret Atwood, but it's a very different Atwood we hear in Plasticene Suite, a 12-page poem in nine sections about non-recyclable plastic. A sample: “Some supermarkets have banned it./ Also drinking straws./ Maybe there will be a tax/ or other laws.”

This Atwood, 80, is the revered author of more than 50 books, including a couple of my favourite novels. It's been a decade since her last poetry collection, though, so now we get Dearly. Setting aside Plasticene Suite, Dearly includes some good poems (Blizzard, about her late mother, is touching), plenty of polished and competent poems, and a handful of the worst I've read this year.

Unlike a 1960s Atwood poem, you can usually guess where a 2020 Atwood poem is going, as so many of them make the same manoeuvres. About a dozen in Dearly end with a rhetorical question in the last line, sometimes a run of such questions.

It's hard to believe this dirge came from the same pen as the most inventively savage portrait of man-warped nature I've read: Oryx and Crake. In Atwood's sci-fi novel, children grow up in a world where birds have been replaced by mutant “Chickienobs” ready for the nugget factory.

Some of that Oryxian playfulness comes through here in lively dramatic monologues, though they feel like responses to workshop exercises: Why not write a poem in the voice of a spider? A siren? A drone?

The Atwood of 2020 prefers her imagery triedand-tested, familiar, safe.