‘No one comes back’: Margaret Atwood’s antiwar poem debuts at Venice Biennale
Margaret Atwood has written a new protest poem about the impact of war that will be unveiled at the Venice Biennale on Tuesday.
The poem, shared this weekend exclusively with the Observer, was written to be shown alongside more than 200 works, including the art of painters
Francisco de Goya and Otto Dix, in an exhibition designed to emphasise the futility of human conflict.
The work from the celebrated Canadian author of The Handmaid’s Tale is called The Disasters of War: A Sequel and summons up the forces of destruction, fire and violence, in language that likens the experience of emotional loss to the physical damage of war.
Considering the visible and invisible aftermaths of loss and injury, Atwood, 84, delivers the sombre verdict: “All are lethal.”
Her poem, which will be unveiled in full on Tuesday, takes its name from Goya’s celebrated series of 80 etchings, Los Desastres de la Guerra,completedbetween 1810 and 1820. An image from the series, Lo Mismo (or The Same), is also displayed in the exhibit, put together by an influential Canadian art patron to run alongside the 60th International Art Exhibition, which comes to the Italian city every other summer.
The show, Beati pacifici, is drawn from the works in the Bailey Collection and is being staged at a church, Chiesa di San Samuele, until September. It has been described by its curator, the wealthy philanthropist and collector Bruce Bailey, as an anti-heroic history of western war art. The works selected trace the chain of conflict through art from the 17th century to the present day,