Life in America: The Reagan Years, A Webography

Other Works by Atwood:  The Poetry


Double Persephone (1961)

The Circle Game (1964)

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The appearance of Margaret Atwood's first major collection of poetry marked the beginning of a truly outstanding career in Canadian and international letters. The voice in these poems is as witty, vulnerable, direct, and incisive as we've come to know in later works. Atwood writes compassionately about the risks of love in a technological age, and the quest for identity in a universe that cannot quite be trusted. Containing many of Atwood's best and most famous poems, The Circle Gamewon the 1966 Governor General's Award for Poetry and rapidly attained an international reputation as a classic of modern poetry.  BUY IT HERE

Expeditions (1965)

Speeches for Doctor Frankenstein (1966)

The Animals in that Country (1968)

The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970)

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The poetic/artistic exploration of what it means to find yourself thrown into a hostile environment, these poems by Margaret Atwood and silk-screen illustrations by Charles Pachter are based on the journals of Canadian pioneer Susanna Moodie. The setting allows Atwood to write cutting lines about the fundamental tensions in creating and defining a self. One such tension, the assertion of will on the world as well as on one's self, set against the spirit-crushing tribulations of loneliness and hopelessness, is especially electric. The Journals of Susanna Moodie is a beautiful and hypnotic book.  BUY IT HERE

Procedures for Underground (1970)

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Procedures for Underground is a book of poetry written by Canadian author Margaret Atwood and published by Little, Brown & Co. in 1970, and in paperback by both LB&C and Oxford University Press, Canada in 1971. The poems of Procedures for Underground explore the territory of the psyche, evoking mythological archetypes, subconscious experience, and personal obsessions. This space of epiphanies and metamorphosis is, for Atwood, the "underground."  BUY IT HERE

Power Politics (1971)

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Margaret Atwood's Power Politicsfirst appeared in 1971, startling its audience with its vital dance of woman and man. Thirty years later it still startles, and is just as iconoclastic as ever. These poems occupy all at once the intimate, the political, and the mythic. Here Atwood makes us realize that we may think our own personal dichotomies are unique, but really they are multiple, universal. Clear, direct, wry, unrelenting-Atwood's poetic powers are honed to perfection in this important early work.    BUY IT HERE

You are Happy (1974)

Selected Poems (1975)

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Atwood is considered by many to be among Canada's finest writers, and her new collection should support that opinion. Thematically complex, her poetry is difficult to categorize: when she writes about Canada, as in "Four Small Elegies," she goes beyond a regional perspective; and though a feminist, she does not necessarily evoke pacifism. Violence, she discovers, is implicit in human nature, as shown in the snake poem "She": "He's our idea of a bad time, we are his./ I say he out of habit. It could be she. " Fatalistic and mordant, her diction may be post-modern but is neither experimental nor obscure.  BUY IT HERE

Two-Headed Poems (1978)

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Two-Headed Poems is the eighth book of poems by Canadian author Margaret Atwood.  It was first published in 1978.  The title of the collection refers to its central cycle of poems, which concerns a pair of Siamese twins as a metaphor for Canada. The twins dream of separation, and speak sometimes singly, sometimes together within the poems. The tension of their desire for separation and their inescapable connection evokes the French-English tensions in Canada and Quebec separatism. These tensions are also evoked in the image of two deaf singers, an image which implies that that neither English-Canada nor Quebec listens to each other. However, the metaphors of Two-Headed Poems can also be interpreted on a more personal level to refer to the tensions between lovers.  BUY IT HERE

True Stories (1981)

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True Stories is a collection of poetry by Canadian author Margaret Atwood, published in 1981. The collection is dedicated to poet Carolyn Forché with whom Atwood had discussed her trip to El Salvador as a member of Amnesty International, and the poems both directly and indirectly discuss her views regarding human rights in third-world nations.   The poems of True Stories confront the nature of poetry, question whether they may be conventionally defined as poetry. They diverge from the themes established in her previous poetry; they explore themes of atrocity, of war and torture. Ultimately, they confront whether “poems come from such horrors?”  BUY IT HERE

Love Songs of a Terminator (1983)

Interlunar (1984)

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Interlunar is a 1984 poetry collection by Canadian author Margaret Atwood. One of her lesser documented works, the collection is divided into two sections. The first, Snake Woman, explores one of her favorite motifs, the snake. The second section, Interlunar, deals with themes of darkness.   It features a poem The Robber Bridegroom, that she later used as a title for a novel. Interlunar features several more myths related from a female point of view, including Orpheus,Eurydice, and Letter from PersephoneBUY IT HERE

Morning in the Burned House (1995)

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In her first poetry collection since 1987's Selected Poems II, Atwood brings a swift, powerful energy to meditative poems that often begin in domestic settings and then broaden into numinous dialogues. In "In the Secular Night," the speaker, who has wandered through her house talking to herself of the "sensed absences of God," realizes "Several hundred years ago/this could have been mysticism/ or heresy. It isn't now." In five roughly thematic sections, Atwood often displays incisive humor ("Ava Gardner Reincarnated as a Magnolia"). The most vivid poems forge an apprehensible human aspect from scholarly fields of science, history and religion: in "Half-hanged Mary" a woman who was being hanged for witchery, survives and tolls each hour until she is cut down. The final grouping seems compiled from the charred remains of a deeply examined life, where only "the power of what is not there" may transcend. Atwood's lean, free-verse style renders these apocryphal poems intimate and immediate. BUY IT HERE

Eating Fire: Selected Poems, 1965-1995  (1998)

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The evolution of Margaret Atwood's poetry illuminates one of our major literary talents. Here, as in her novels, is intensity combined with sardonic detachment, and in these early poems her genius for a level stare at the ordinary is wonderfully apparent. Just as startling is her ability to contrast the everyday with the terrifying: 'Each time I hit a key/ on my electric typewriter/ speaking of peaceful trees/ another village explodes.' Her poetic voice is crystal clear, insistent, unmistakably her own. Through bus trips and postcards, wilderness and trivia, she reflects the passion and energy of a writer intensely engaged with her craft and the world. Two former collections, Poems 1965 - 1975 and Poems 1976 - 1986, are presented together with her latest collection, Morning in the Burned House, in this omnibus that represents the development of a major poet.  BUY IT HERE

The Door (2007)

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The first book of poems in 12 years from the now world-famous Canadian author (The Handmaid's Tale) combines an older writer's reflections on aging with the dire warnings-political, environmental and moral-familiar from Atwood's recent fiction. Short lines and deliberate, balanced phrases consider how "my mother dwindles and dwindles/ and lives and lives," how senior citizens hike and trek across tundra, and how privileged citizens of rich nations might understand refugees from far-off wars. "Owl and Pussycat, Some Years Later"-the longest poem in the book, the wittiest and likely the best-retells the familiar rhyme as a parable of late-career poets, rueful and "no longer semi-immortal," yet still conversing, still writing, as they go on rowing "out past the last protecting/ sandbar." Other verse shows Atwood-who began as a poet, despite her fame as a novelist-looking at the climate for new poetry amid the sometimes funny parochialism of its audiences (in Canada or anywhere). Yet the predominant notes are fiercely grim: ice melts and cracks, mammals head towards extinction, "the hurt child will bite you... And its blood will seep into the water/ and you will drink it every day." One page compares all poets everywhere to violinists on the Titanic. Another declares, truthfully, "That's what I do:/ I tell dark stories/ before and after they come true."  BUY IT HERE