Paper Boat: New and Selected Poems, 1961-2023

by Margaret Atwood

An extraordinary career-spanning collection from one of the most revered poets and storytellers of our ageTracing the legacy of Margaret Atwood—a writer who has fundamentally shaped the contemporary literary landscapes—Paper Boat assembles Atwood’s most vital poems in one essential volume.In pieces that are at once brilliant, beautiful, and hyper-imagined, Atwood gives voices to remarkably drawn characters—mythological figures, animals, and everyday people—all of whom have something to say about what it means to live in a world as strange as our own. “How can one live with such a heart?” Atwood asks, casting her singular spell upon the reader, and ferrying us through life, death, and whatever comes next. Walking the tightrope between reality and fantasy as only she can, Atwood’s journey through poetry illuminates our most innate joys and sorrows, desires and fears.Spanning six decades of work—from her earliest beginnings to brand new poems—this volume charts the evolution of one of our most iconic and necessary authors.

Genres: Poetry, Feminism, Nonfiction, Canada, Audiobook

624 pages, Hardcover

First published October 8, 2024

About the author

Margaret Atwood was born in 1939 in Ottawa and grew up in northern Ontario, Quebec, and Toronto. She received her undergraduate degree from Victoria College at the University of Toronto and her master's degree from Radcliffe College.

Throughout her writing career, Margaret Atwood has received numerous awards and honourary degrees. She is the author of more than thirty-five volumes of poetry, children’s literature, fiction, and non-fiction and is perhaps best known for her novels, which include The Edible Woman (1970), The Handmaid's Tale (1983), The Robber Bride (1994), Alias Grace (1996), and The Blind Assassin, which won the prestigious Booker Prize in 2000. Atwood's dystopic novel, Oryx and Crake, was published in 2003. The Tent (mini-fictions) and Moral Disorder (short stories) both appeared in 2006. Her most recent volume of poetry, The Door, was published in 2007. Her non-fiction book, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth ­ in the Massey series, appeared in 2008, and her most recent novel, The Year of the Flood, in the autumn of 2009. Ms. Atwood's work has been published in more than forty languages, including Farsi, Japanese, Turkish, Finnish, Korean, Icelandic and Estonian. In 2004 she co-invented the Long Pen TM.

Margaret Atwood currently lives in Toronto with writer Graeme Gibson.

Associations: Margaret Atwood was President of the Writers' Union of Canada from May 1981 to May 1982, and was President of International P.E.N., Canadian Centre (English Speaking) from 1984-1986. She and Graeme Gibson are the Joint Honourary Presidents of the Rare Bird Society within BirdLife International. Ms. Atwood is also a current Vice-President of PEN International.

Reviews

[s.penkevich [hiatus-will return-miss you all] · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hot take: I prefer Margaret Atwood the poet to Margaret Atwood the novelist.
While best known for her haunting dystopian worlds illuminating sharp social critiques, the decorated and beloved feminist Canadian writer has published just as many collections of poetry as she has novels. Starting her career as a poet with her publication of Double Persephone in 1961, Atwood has long crafted brilliant works that tackle many of the signature themes of her novels and delivers gorgeous prose so sharp you’d swear it can cut you. And at the age of 85, she is still going strong. Paper Boats: New and Selected Poems spans the entirety of Atwood’s prodigious poetic career, drawing out a blissful collection of notable poetry as well as uncollected works and new poems for 600 pages of brilliance. I’ve spent a few months absorbed in this collection and it has become a treasured tome I’ve been lovingly lugging around with me. With a range of innovative styles and themes, and incorporating figures from both history and myth, Atwood gazes into explorations of life and death and all the griefs, loves (‘ If I love you / is that a fact or a weapon?’), joys, and perils of aging. Balancing the personal with the political while also granting an impressive universality to her words, Margaret Atwood proves herself as equally—if not more—accomplished a storyteller as a poet as she is a novelist.

The Moment

The moment when, after many years
of hard work and a long voyage
you stand in the centre of your room,
house, half-acre, square mile, island, country,
knowing at last how you got there,
and say, I own this,

is the same moment when the trees unloose
their soft arms from around you,
the birds take back their language,
the cliffs fissure and collapse,
the air moves back from you like a wave
and you can’t breathe.

No, they whisper. You own nothing.
You were a visitor, time after time
climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming.
We never belonged to you.
You never found us.
It was always the other way round.

Having written numerous works of fiction for adults and children, non-fiction, two graphic novels and even the libretto for an opera, Atwood holds that ‘poetry is the most joyful form.’ As she said in conversation with Joyce Carol Oates on poetry, it isn’t ‘a "rational" activity,’ but for her it is ‘an aural one.’ Citing Edgar Allan Poe as her first influence, Atwood ‘began writing at the age of 5,’ but then stopped until ‘I started again at 16 and have no idea why, but it was suddenly the only thing I wanted to do.’ As she writes in the acknowledgements here ‘there weren't a lot of party dresses in my young life, but there were always lots of books,’ and we are all the beneficiaries of her early interest in books and stories. Atwood would launch into the literary world with her second volume of poetry, The Circle Game, in 1964 winning her the prestigious Governor’s General Award. Poetry flows from her and feels so effortless on the page, though the best description of her poetry likely comes from Atwood’s own poem,Sor Juana Works in the Garden:

When you stand on bare earth in your bare feet
and the lightning whips through you, two ways
at once, they say you are grounded,
and that’s what poetry is: a hot wire.
You might as well stick a fork
in a wall socket. So don’t think it’s just about flowers.
Though it is, in a way.

Poetry like a jolt of electricity, poetry that wakes you up to the world. In Atwood we see the many symbols take on a far deeper meaning: the moon as mystery or menace, snakes as symbolic of the human condition or transformation, landscapes as expressions of the body and more. She moves through forms and excels at both long and short forms, being able to produce incredible effect with just a few brief words such as this poem, shown here in its entirety:

you fit into me
like a hook into an eye

a fish hook
an open eye

I have a friend who got that poem tattooed on their arm, which is pretty cool. And so is Atwood’s poetry. She has a knack for blending the past with the present in examinations of the human condition that grants an introspective universality to it and historical figures often appear in her poems as a sort of character study. For instance the Half Hanged Mary (its a long one, you can read it HERE) is based on Mary Webster, a 17th century woman accused and acquitted of witchcraft and a possible ancestor to Atwood. ‘On Monday, my grandmother would say Mary was her ancestor, and on Wednesday she would say she wasn't,’ Atwood once told the New Yorker, ‘so take your pick.’ Atwood would also dedicate her novel The Handmaid's Tale to Webster. But, as a lifelong fan of fables and myths, Atwood also incorporates figures of legend into her work. Poems appear to a whole slew of mythical figures like Sekhmet, the Egyptian goddess (‘What did you expect from gods / with animal heads?’), Persephone (‘from her all springs arise / to her all falls return’) and some great fire from Helen of Troy (read the full poem of Helen of Troy Does Counter Dancing HERE):

‘You think I’m not a goddess?
Try me.
This is a torch song.
Touch me and you’ll burn’

There are recurring poems as well about Orpheus and Eurydice, whom thinks ‘you could not believe I was more than your echo’ and recognizes ‘it is not through him / you will get your freedom.’ This last line in Eurydice brushes up on a common theme throughout all of Atwood’s work: freedom and equity for women will not and cannot come from reliance on men but must be gained on women’s own terms. Her novels and poetry are rife with gender politics. You may recall Atwood’s often quoted line that ‘Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them,’ in her series of Songs for Murdered Sisters from Dearly where she writes of ‘So many sisters killed / over the years, thousands of year / killed by fearful men / Who wanted to be taller.’ It is a deeply affecting poem that reminds the reader of the serious threat of violence against women, such as in They Are Hostile Nations where she pleads ‘put down the target of me.’ She addresses a multitude of feminist issues in her works, such as the way women are objectified and judged for their looks in ways that men typically are not, especially when it comes to aging such as in Miss July Grows Older where she writes:

‘How much longer can I get away
with being so fucking cute?
Not much longer.’

Atwood writes with such power and dives deep into social criticisms that are often represented in her novels as well. Even her dystopian work, which you can feel many shades of in the poems contained in Interlunar, a collection critic Linda Wagner-Martin called a ‘stark testimony to disaster.’

‘Last year I abstained
this year I devour

without guilt
which is also an art’

Aging is a common theme in much of her work, particularly in her later collection. And with aging, death is often on her mind as well. There are poems such as Flowers about watching her father slowly pass, watching a ‘suffering you can neither cure nor enter–there are worse things, but not many.’ Or the incredible poem My Mother Dwindles (read it HERE) where she compares her mother aging as ‘like watching somebody drown’:

If she were a boat, you'd say
the moon shines through her ribs
and no one's steering,
yet she can't be said to be drifting;
somebody's in there.

She often reminds us of our own mortality as well in a way that reminds me a bit of another favorite poet, Jane Hirshfield, such as in Invisible Man where she reflects on a future that will not contain any of us:

It’s you in the future,
we both know that.
You’ll be here but not here,
a muscle memory, like hanging a hat
on a hook that’s not there any longer.

I really love the image of a hat on a hook no longer there. Though another common theme in her poems are her cats and even the cats are not immune to reflections on aging and death. There is Ghost Cat about her cat suffering from dementia but also one of my favorites, Mourning For Cats, observing that of all the animals we lament the loss of, cats tend to stand out most. Here is the latter half:

Do we think they are like dead children?
Do we think they are a part of us,
the animal soul
stashed somewhere near the heart,
fuzzy and trusting,
and vital and on the prowl,
and brutal towards other forms of life,
and happy most of the time,
and also stupid?
(Why almost always cats? Why do dead cats
call up such ludicrous tears?
Why such deep mourning?
Because we can no longer
see in the dark without them?
Because we’re cold
without their fur? Because we’ve lost
our hidden second skin,
the one we’d change into
when we wanted to have fun,
when we wanted to kill things
without a second thought,
when we wanted to shed the dull grey weight
of being human?)

But not everything is bleak in Atwood poetry and much of it is rather rambunctious and rebellious. Atwood describes life as a ‘cage of bones’ in the titular poem from The Circle Game (read it HERE) with rather dynamic imagery depicting all us us caught in a self-perpetuating cycle of conformity from the cradle to the grave. ‘I want to break the cycle,’ she concludes. It is one of her earlier works but this rebelliousness would carry through for the entirety of her career and become one of the themes most largely associated with her.

Habitation

Marriage is not
a house or even a tent
it is before that, and colder:
the edge of the forest, the edge
of the desert
       the unpainted stairs
at the back where we squat
outside, eating popcorn
the edge of the receding glacier
where painfully and with wonder
at having survived even
this far
we are learning to make fire

Of all her themes, however, I tend to enjoy Atwood best when she writes about love. ‘I would like to be the air / that inhabits you for a moment / only,’ she writes in Variation on the Word Sleep, ‘I would like to be that unnoticed / & that necessary.’ She also gets longing down really well, such as in Postcard (read it HERE) which is one of my favorites and ends like this:

‘ A universe that includes you
can't be all bad, but
does it? At this distance
you're a mirage, a glossy image
fixed in the posture
of the last time I saw you.
Turn you over, there's the place
for the address. Wish you were
here. Love comes
in waves like the ocean, a sickness which goes on
& on, a hollow cave
in the head, filling & pounding, a kicked ear.’

She moves between sweet and sardonic in her poems on love, resisting being an object yet also embracing the idea of being able to belong to one another. ‘Love is not a profession / genteel or otherwise’ she writes in Is/Not, a rather fun poem contrasting emotion and science to show that the realm of the heart is not mere data and math. She can be quite funny as well with lines like ‘You asked for love / I gave you only descriptions / Please die I said / so I can write about it.’ Each page of this book is a gem, honestly.

Nothing

Nothing like love to put blood
back in the language,
the difference between the beach and its
discrete rocks and shards, a hard
cuneiform, and the tender cursive
of waves; bone and liquid fish egg, desert
& salt marsh, a green push
out of death. The vowels plump
again like lips or soaked fingers, and the fingers
themselves move around these
softening pebbles as around skin. The sky’s
not vacant and over there but close
against your eyes, molten, so near
you can taste it. It tastes of
salt. What touches
you is what you touch.

Atwood often addresses the reader to which I always enjoy. And she puts you right into the poem. Like this one:

Now

I love you now, right now
inside this one word now, the one you’re reading
now. And then of course this means
I love you now forever, just as
long as you can stay inside
this lemon egg of time
your mouth makes as
you say this word – now try it – see,
an egg of air,
and you will be protected now by
such a soft round sound
though now, just now,
the loose assemblage of the sounds
I think of now as I
may now have long since drifted
softly into the air, I’m dustmotes now, but just
start over, start up there
again, just where I say I love
you now, right
now right

I truly find Atwood to be just as much an accomplished poet as the best of her novels and, frankly, prefer reading her poetry. Paper Boat is a marvelous collection that allows the reader to experience the entirety of her career and enjoy the growth and experimentations of her work over the decades. A big book, but one that validates such a heft with the quality of the work within. I’ve enjoyed reading this for the past few months and can’t wait to return to it again and again.

4.5/5

‘But sing on, sing
on, someone may still be listening
besides me. The fish for instance.
Anyway, my dearest one,
we still have the moon.’
—from The Owl and the Pussycat, Some Years Later

[Erin · Rating 4 out of 5]

ARC for review. To be published October 8, 2024. My birthday! I’ll bet she knows that! Margaret Atwood is giving me a gift! Hey, it could happen! David Sedaris gave me a black penis crayon on my birthday on my birthday one year. This is a true story.

Huge book of new and selected poems from Atwood’s first published book up through 2023, so wide swaths of her life represented. Atwood is one of my favorite writers but I found her poetry a little tough…some of it just did not seem to want to let me in.

Much of her early poetry is about love. . I picture her reciting it to her beloved in various rooms of a sparsely furnished farmhouse somewhere.

Some of my favorites, and they came from throughout the book, were: “The Immigrants,” “Five Poems for Grandmothers,” “Sunset II,” Mothers,” “How to Tell One Country From Another,” “Flowers,” “The Last Rational Man,” (which I would like to send to Mitt Romney, Liz Cheney and a few others) “Songs for Murdered Sisters,” “At the Translation Conference” and “Scattering Wood.”

Habitation

Marriage is not
a house or even a tent

it is before that, and colder.

the edge of the forest, the edge
of the desert
the unpainted stairs
at the back where we squat
outside, eating popcorn

the edge of the receding glacier

where painfully and with wonder
at having survived even
this far

we are learning to make fire

And some other gems, just excerpts:

if you don’t have hands like theirs
large and capable, the hands
of plump muscular angels,
the ones that blow trumpets and lift swords.
They shift him carefully, tuck in the corners.
It hurts, but as little as possible.
Pain is their lore. The rest of us
are helpless amateurs.

A suffering you can neither cure nor enter -
there are worse things, but not many.
After awhile it makes us impatient.
Can’t we do anything but feel sorry?


Sunset, now that we’re finally in it
is not what we thought.


How much havoc this woman spills
out of herself into us
merely by being
unhappy with such finality.


On this side of the table
women do not say No.
There is a word for No, but women do not say it.
It would be too abrupt.
To say No, you can say Perhaps.
You will be understood,
On most occasions.


Where have you gone? If anywhere,
dear ones and twos and threes

[emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

'A wave is neither form/ nor energy. Both. Neither.'

Since I'm already familiar with her older ones, it came as no surprise, to have enjoyed and love this full(er) collection by the one and only Margaret Atwood. Fab cover, and the weighted thickness of it all is so lush, much to adore. Don't get me wrong, the battered second-hand copies of her smaller collections are still quite lovely, but this one just felt especially more like a treat. In any case, a new edition that any Atwood readers/fans just can't complain about. RTC later (maybe?)

[Henk]

New Margaret Atwood incoming and I am here for it!

Looking forward to reading more poetry of this Canadian icon!

[Julie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've spent a month with this book and it is not enough. Margaret Atwood writes poetry about every aspect of humanity. It's amazing and beautiful and thorny and..... I probably need to return this copy to the library and purchase one for my personal library.

Absolute Favorite poems:
Some Objects of Wood and Stone
At the Tourist Centre in Boston
Disembarking at Quebec
Death of a Young Son by Drowning
The Immigrants
The entire section titled: from Morning in the Burned House
Paper Boat
The Muse of Sorrow

From the Acknowledgements:

Margaret Atwood writes: "Thank you to my readers. Without readers, no writers, and vice versa. Writing passes from hand to hand, and if you are reading this, my writing is now in your hands. To paraphrase a great aphorist, the spirit blows wherever it wishes. I hope you don't find it an ill wind."

Then, she ends with: "There weren't a lot of party dresses in my young life, but there were always lots of books. That was major."

[nathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Major thanks to NetGalley and Knopf for sending me an ARC of this book in exchange for my honest thoughts:

*3.75

It's too much poetry in one go. It's literally her life's work as a poet. But you can always count on Atwood when it comes to musings on love, death, the primal perspective, and nature. You see the waves of time crash with the way her themes coalesce and become. It's a real treat. Much like watching the evening tides take up noise and shape over ancient rocks by moonlight. At one point you're in awe. At other points you wonder when you should leave or stay.

Definitely something wonderful to have by the bedside amongst other readings over a span of a few months or even a year. Because, it's a lot. Like A LOT.

[Amanda NEVER MANDY · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book contains a massive amount of poetry. It covers over sixty years of Margaret Atwood’s poetry writing career. It was for sure not the enjoyable experience I wanted it to be because it was too much. It reminded me of the time my parents vacationed in Australia and came back with the fattest stack of tourist pics I have ever seen and expected me to look through them as they narrated their experience. We are talking about pictures of a rock in the desert, a restaurant sign, a bird flying over and many shots of a passing landscape from a car window. People that do this, please stop. Nobody wants it. How about you share the best ones, the ones that mean the most to you and we can all appreciate those together. Which is exactly what I wished would have happened with this collection.

With that said, I did enjoy one poem in particular:

“Aging Female Poet Sits on the Balcony”

“Ah men,
why do you want
all this attention?
I can write poems for myself, make
love to a doorknob if absolutely
necessary. What do you have to offer me
I can’t find otherwise
except humiliation? Which I no longer
need.”

And here are some snippets from other poems that also made me smile:

“Please die I said
so I can write about it”

“With arms wide the skater
turns, leaving her breath like a diver’s
trail of bubbles.”

“You refuse to own
yourself, you permit
others to do it for you:

you become slowly more public,
in a year there will be nothing left
of you but a megaphone”

“Returning from the dead
used to be something I did well

I began asking why
I began forgetting how”

“I should be doing something
other than you.”

“Last year I abstained
this year I devour

without guilt
which is also an art”

Two stars to a collection that made me pine for Plath.

[Nancy · Rating 5 out of 5]

…and that’s what poetry is: a hot wire. You might as well stick a fort in a wall socket. from sor juana works in the garden by Margaret Atwood

Golly, I loved this collection of poems from across Atwood’s career. She addresses so many things: nature, marriage, the oppression of women, aging, disease, grief, the ‘plasticine’ age, the writer’s life, the transience of fame. She recreates the lives of historical womens, including an immigrant to Canada and a woman hung for being a witch who survived.

Here are some of my favorites.

the small cabin describes returning to the burnt ruins of a house once lived in. Nostalgia for previous homes always draw me in; I never recovered from the loss of my first home.

miss july grows older reflects on the loss of a sexual life, with the terrific line, “But after a while these flesh arpeggios get boring, like Bach over and over; too much of one kind of glory.”

the loneliness of the military historian who believes “Wars happen because the ones who start them think they can win,” and continues, “But rats and cholera have won many wars.”

half-hanged mary is the chilling story of a woman who may have been Atwood’s ancestor. Mary Webster was accused of witchcraft and hung overnight; the next morning her body was taken down and she was found to be alive. She tells her story, saying “My audience is God, because who the hell else could understand me? Who else has been dead twice?”

flowers recounts a dying father, whose “suffering you can neither cure nor enter–there are worse things, but not many.” Having spent two months at my dying father’s bedside, this poem especially affects me.

In the daylight we know
what’s gone is gone,
but at night it’s different.
Nothing gets finished,
not dying, not mourning;
the dead repeat themselves, like clumsy drunks
lurching sideways through the doors
we open to them in sleep;
these slurred guests, never entirely welcome,
even those we have loved the most,
especially those we have loved the most,
returning from where we shoved them
away too quickly:
from under the ground, from under the water,
they clutch at us, they clutch at us,
we won’t let go.

from two dreams, 2 by Margaret Atwood

I loved these lines from crickets : “September. Wild aster. Fox grapes, tiny and bitter,/ the indigo taste of winter/already blooming inside them.”

And from owl and pussycat, some years later, considering the role of an aging artist in the world: “Whatever/made us think we could change the world?/Us and our clever punctuation marks.” She continues, “But surely there is still/a job to be done by us, at least/time to be passed; for instance, we could/celebrate inner beauty. Gardens./ Love and desire. Lust. Children. Social justice/of various kinds. Include fear and war./Describe what it is to be tired.” And ends, “But sing on, sing/on, someone may still be listening/besides me.”

We are listening still. Sing it, girl.

Thanks to the publisher for a free book through NetGalley.

[Keely · Rating 5 out of 5]

Margaret Atwood may be best known as a fiction writer, captivating readers with her richly imagined dystopian story worlds. But she also did a fair share of world building as a steadily publishing poet over a writing career spanning six decades. Paper Boat gathers highlights from across that impressive span, including everything from the early formal poems of Double Persephone (1961), to previously uncollected poems written as recently as 2023. The result is a collection that showcases Atwood's endless inventiveness as she visits and revisits themes of mythology, nature, animals, feminism, history, death, and grief. Poems formerly separated by decades are newly juxtaposed, placed in dialogue with each other. And what they mainly seem to talk to each other about is how bizarre, and often brutal, the world can be.

That's not to say that Atwood's poetry is all bleak and gritty. She can be evocative describing the colors of a sunset or the hush of a lake at night reflecting stars. She can be moving, imagining her father's formative experiences in nature in the poem "butterfly" (my favorite). And her poems are frequently funny--often, darkly so, as in the well-known "you fit into me..." poem, but other times in a winking, good-natured way, like she's letting you in on a little joke that bubbled up from her singular way of looking at everything.

One thing Atwood's poems almost always are: Challenging. The language of her poems may be mostly conversational, but she is not an easy poet. I think that's a helpful thing to know going in if, like me, you've grown accustomed to highly accessible poetry that would be right at home on Instagram. It can be tough to track with some of Atwood's imaginative leaps, and to orient yourself within some of her poems. But the rewards are so worth it. Paper Boat is a treasure--full of those rewards if you're willing to work just a little for them. And of course, the beautiful thing about challenging poems is, you can read them again and again and never be bored with them. I chose the fire-hose approach for my first read of Paper Boat, chugging through the whole collection in a week. But I look forward to returning for smaller, more leisurely sips.

My thanks to Knopf and NetGalley for providing me with a review copy of this phenomenal poetry collection, which will be published on October 8, 2024.

[Nathaniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

My recommendation for this collection is to get your own copy so you can read it slowly over months (or even years), but the hardcover is so expensive and most people (like me) will probably end up getting it from the library and end up reading it in a week or so. I didn't think about how much poetry would fit into 600 pages until I reached the 300 page mark and realized I was only half done. One of the beautiful things about short poetry collections is how they are a cohesive piece that you can read and be fully satisfied with. This is broken up, but it's still one thick book that starts to almost feel like a chore (again, because it was a library copy lol)

But this gets five stars because this is Margaret Atwood and she is amazing at everything she writes. I really love the way her poems go between personal and narrative. I would love to see a novel in verse from her.

[☀︎El In Oz☀︎ · Rating 4 out of 5]

4/5

Wow!! Margaret Atwood shows her talent in this poetry collection, I can say that much. 600+ pages of some absolutely breathtaking poems. I will admit that she sort of lost me in the last 40%….. I don’t think I’m the biggest fan of her new style.
That being said, I found some new all time favourite poems, so thank you Margaret for peeking into my brain before I was born to write a few of these :)

[Kyle · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had set out to read one poem a day from this book thinking it would take me a full year to complete….. but realistically I needed to read a lot more than one poem a day if I wanted to complete this collection in 365 days. I upped my game to three poems a day (occasionally five), and now I’m here at the end, craving more.

Atwood’s poetry is some of the best poetry in existence. Paper Boat, collecting Atwood’s poems into one bible of selected poetry, so neatly organized by the collections they were originally published in, and then, as a bonus at the end, some previously unreleased works, is unsinkable. 60 years of her best word-smithing bound together in one, beautiful volume to stand the tests of time.

5/5

[Jackie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a career-spanning anthology of Atwood's work and while not complete collection, the selection is broad and varied. The chronological order of the selections allowed me to get some insights into Atwood's life and what she was thinking about at different ages. She's always strongly herself of course, but it was an interesting perspective on her. I would recommend this to any fans of her work. Obviously with poetry some will grab you and some won't, so a large collection like this is nice because you're more likely to encounter some phase of her writing that really sits with you.

ARC provided by the publisher via NetGalley.

[anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

“(…) If I love you
is that a fact or a weapon?”

Soixante années de poèmes rassemblées en un recueil, voilà qui est intimidant. Je suis assez habituée depuis ma lecture de l’oeuvre complète de Louise Glück et je pense même que c’est maintenant ma façon préférée de lire des poèmes, plutôt que de lire de courts recueils. J’aime voir la progression stylistique et mentale de la poétesse, on traverse le livre comme elle traverse sa vie, c’est passionnant.
Ici, ce n’est pas un recueil exhaustif, mais une sélection de poèmes de chacun de ses recueils publiés, mais en raison de la taille de l’ouvrage, je le range dans la même catégorie.

Nous sommes alors témoins de sa progression, et j’ai noté plusieurs étapes dans sa construction :

“Why is it
(I’m thinking
of the careful moulding
round the stonework archways)
that in this time, such
elaborate defences keep
things that are no longer
(much)
worth defending?”

1. Recueils « Double Persephone » ; « Uncollected poems I » ; « The Circle Game » ; « The Animals in That Country » et « The Journals of Susanna Moodie » : Les premiers recueils de l’ouvrage regroupent des poèmes moins puissants et moins frappants. Ils sont, pour la plupart, d’inspiration historique et relèvent davantage d’une rigueur stylistique typique des débuts poétiques.

“You asked for love
I gave you only descriptions
Please die I said
so I can write about it”

2. Recueils « Procedures for Underground » et « Power Politics » : Les poèmes de ces deux recueils ont pour thème principal l’amour. La grande majorité est articulé autour du sujet je qui s’adresse au tu aimé. Ce sont des poèmes plus titubants qui peuvent, à mon avis, être trop personnels, voire gênants à lire, j’ai parfois l’impression de lire ce qui ne m’est pas destiné. En revanche, certains vers sortent magnifiquement du lot et justifient la lecture de ces poèmes.

“what you can’t give away you must carry with you,
it is always heavier than you thought.”

3. Recueil « You are happy » : Il y a dans ce recueil un véritable recentrement sur soi, marqué du poids de la culpabilité et du passé, ce qui est beaucoup plus intéressant que les recueils précédents.

“Last year I abstained
this year I devour

without guilt
which is also an art”

J’allais continuer à répertorier mais je me suis laisser perdre dans l’amas de poèmes, où l’on navigue d’arbre en rivière en passant par les mains et les miroirs. J’ai arrêté de penser à cette review et j’ai laissé les phrases briller sous mes yeux, pendant que d’autres disparaissaient. Je regrette de l’avoir peut-être lu trop vite ; on dit toujours que la poésie doit être lue lentement, mais j’aime la lire en grande quantité. Je pense que, comme le Glück, je le relirai un jour, probablement en été, pour voir si ça change de l’hiver, l’année prochaine ou bien longtemps après ça, histoire de comparer mes annotations. En tout cas, Atwood a cette capacité à écrire des poèmes qui arrivent à te persuader qu’elle sait tout ce que tu ne sais pas et que tu rêves de savoir, c’est fascinant.

Enfin, voici mes poèmes préférés du recueil, si vous n’avez pas le temps pour les 600 pages, ils en valent absolument la peine : « The Small Cabin », « There is Only One of Everything » et « Scattering Wood »

[Richelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

This tome serves as an essential introduction to the poetry of Margaret Atwood, spanning her entire poetic literary career. The poems I liked best in this huge volume were the anthropomorphic works, those poems that gave a human voice to animals and mythological creatures, and the poems that celebrated historical and everyday figures. Her poems delved into a range of emotions: joy, sorrow, fear, desire, anger, love. Not every poem landed for me, so that’s why I’m giving this book a 3.75 star rating.

[Emily Frueh · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love how her poetry changes across the course of her life - it grows as she grows and deepens as she deepens. I will be returning to poems throughout regularly!

[Emily | bookwhispererem · Rating 3 out of 5]

It pains me to say this, but unfortunately, this poetry collection is a DNF for me. While I think Margaret Atwood is a terrific writer and her poetry itself is well-written, it simply isn’t my preferred style when reading poetry. Atwood leans much more into descriptive aspects in her poetry versus raw relatability and I personally gravitate more towards vulnerable poetic writing that I can relate to.

Others will—and absolutely should—love this career-spanning collection of Atwood’s poetry.

Thank you to Margaret Atwood, Knopf, & NetGalley for the ARC! All opinions are my own.

[Madison · Rating 3 out of 5]

I received an advanced copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review:

Coming into this book with only familiarity as Atwood as a novelist, and a brief ponderance over her poetry from her collection, Dearly, I approached this largely unminded. More modern poetry has been less in my own inclination (I still think all lines should rhyme in some form or fashion), but I was interested to see how an author with such vivid and unique story-telling and worldbuilding capabilities could create in a more lyrical, contained writing form. My experience within Atwood’s world of poetry was less stellar than I might have presupposed.
Atwood has such a deep sense of poetry’s past and utilizes it evocatively to bring us into the folds of the pages of this book, and all those we’ve read before it. To wield knowledge is power, and to weave that power into creativity is, for the apt of words, poetry. To keep in the traditions that predate her own writings, but also break from such traditions is the means of making new poetry and making poetry new, and I enjoyed reading how Atwood played with the craft itself. She certainly catches me with some of my favorite poetical choices: I always grew excited to see the device of utilizing the title of the poem as, in essence and practice, its first line (“this is a photograph of me”), and I love the utilization of a block poem, as I find the utter overwhelming outpouring of words in what is typically a sparser, to the word form of writing precisely in the emotional mark of great poetry.
All poetry should be resounding, but some lines, I think, must simply hit harder than those that surround them. The best poems, in my opinion, force you to stop somewhere in their midst, make you close the volume, and look away from the absolute wreckage of emotion and devastation and beauty a single line within has wrought. Poetry should devastate as much as it delights; Atwood’s does.
The invocations of poems should be of the utmost importance, and sometimes Atwood tethers us with the first line (“man with a hook,” “the small cabin”), but more often, I felt as though I were ambling into the poem rather than walking through her words like sign postings on a trail, too easily straying from the path by my one musings and wanderings and inclinations to look elsewhere than where the viewpoints drew attention.
Modern poetry, I think, fears long lines, fears losing our attention and understanding if they ask us to read more than five words without a line break, or an implied punctuation. In reality, it makes me sick to read—literally, in that moving my eyes so much back and forth disorientates me, like rocking ever back and forth on a ship in storming waters. I loathe feeling ungrounded in a poem, with roots only four words deep. It breaks me up alongside the poem. That ruptured, seasick empathy should not be my takeaway feeling from nearly every verse.
I’m frightful to admit that I more often liked the idea of the poems, where I could see them going or growing or becoming, than I did where Atwood led us and what she made of it there. The potential outperformed the execution, and that was devastating each time to read. It is one thing to imagine oneself writing alongside the poet, but it was hard to feel oneself writing over her.
The collection was solid: in theming, organization, picks, ebbs and flows. But “solid” should be how you describe a tome, not a treasury of verse. And I must admit, I hate to see “hieroglyphics” used ever (“double persephone”), especially by such a learned woman.

[Nikki · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was an excellent collection of poetry from the master of poetry. Margaret Atwood just has a way of writing that speaks to everyone that reads her work.

This collection was split into different time periods in her writing career and each section definitely speaks to someone in particular.

Atwood can definitely evoke so much emotion with her writing. I will certainly be checking out more of her poetry collections.

Thank you so much to the publisher for an advance copy of this collection via NetGalley!

[Stacy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Paper Boat by Margaret Atwood is exactly what it says it is ... a collection of poems; and it'll blow you away. If you're thinking of reading this then, most likely, you already know who Margaret Atwood is. As you should. This selection of poems is beautiful, wonderful, peaceful yet chaotic, just like everything else she writes.
Best read with a cup of tea (or something stronger).

Thank you to NetGalley for the opportunity to read the ARC of this book.

[Peyton · Rating 4 out of 5]

"At that time I did well, my fingers
were eaten down to the blood.
They never healed.
The word nightshade a shadow,
the colour of a recurring dream
in which you cannot see colour.
Porridge, worn underwear, wool
stockings, my fault. Not purple: some
other colour. Sick
outside in a snowbank.

I dreamed of falling from the bridge,
one hand holding on, unable to call.
In other dreams, I could step into the air.
It was not flying. I never flew."

9/10

[Nien Carstens · Rating 5 out of 5]

a fantastic anthology and a true ode to margaret’s poetry.

i thought the songs of the transformed were absolutely stunning, and as a huge atwood fan it’s so much fun to recognize themes in her poetry that she also writes about in her novels.

margaret atwood is truly the most wonderful author of this time.

[staykind · Rating 4 out of 5]

not the handmaids tale but a good collection

[Imogen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Margaret Atwood and poetry 🤝 sign me up
Trying to retap into the part of me that loves poetry and I lowkey think this did it

[Jack Miner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Don't talk to me I'm contemplating mortality. (More to come probably)

[Carrie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC of this book. I'd read a bit of Margaret Atwood's poetry before, and it was such a gift to get so much in one volume. After this, I can confidently say she's my favorite poet. Her poems are accessible, beautifully written, and relatable. I loved it so much.

[Riton Khan]

আমি কয়েক দশক ধরে মার্গারেট অ্যাটউড পড়ে আসছি, শুরুটা তার প্রথম উপন্যাস The Edible Woman (১৯৬৯) দিয়ে। কবিতা আমার সবচাইতে পছন্দের বিষয়, আমি নিজেও কবিতা লিখি, কবিতার অর্থ সময়ের সাথে সাথে এবং আমাদের জীবনের অভিজ্ঞতার ওপর ভিত্তি করে পরিবর্তিত হয়। তাই এই কবিতাগুলো আমার কাছে নতুন এবং প্রাসঙ্গিক মনে হয়েছে।

অ্যাটউড তার উপন্যাসের জন্য সর্বাধিক পরিচিত হলেও, তিনি একজন কবিও বটে। তিনি মাত্র ৬ বছর বয়সে কবিতা লেখা শুরু করেন এবং ১৯৫০-এর দশকের শেষ দিকে তার কলেজের সাহিত্য সাময়িকীতে প্রথম কবিতা প্রকাশ করেন। ১৯৬০-এর দশক থেকে শুরু করে তিনি ১৮টি কাব্যগ্রন্থ প্রকাশ করেছেন। তার লেখায় প্রেম ও মৃত্যু, মিথ ও রহস্য, রাজনীতি ও ভাষার শক্তি, এবং লিঙ্গ, পরিচয়, প্রাকৃতিক পরিবেশ ও জলবায়ু পরিবর্তনের মতো বিষয়গুলো উঠে এসেছে।

বইটি একটি বিশাল সংকলন (যদি তিনি এটাকে ক্ষুদ্র সংকলন বলেছেন), সমৃদ্ধির এক ভাণ্ডার, একটি অনন্য উপহার, তবে এটি একটানে পড়া কিছুটা কঠিন। প্রতিটি কবিতা আস্তে আস্তে উপভোগ করতে হবে, সময় নিয়ে পড়তে হবে। বারবার এই সংকলনে ফিরে আস্তে হবে। কবিতাগুলি অত্যন্ত সুন্দর, জীবন্ত। অ্যাটউড সবসময়ই বিষয়ের উপর তীক্ষ্ণ দৃষ্টি রাখেন, সবসময় প্রাসঙ্গিক। তার প্রতিটি কথায় গুরুত্বপূর্ণ কিছু থাকে।
আমি অ্যাটউড নিজের কণ্ঠে পড়া বইটির অডিওবুক শুনছি এটা শোনার মজাই অন্যরকম। মনে হয় মেডিটেশন করছি।

মার্গারেট অ্যাটউডের নতুন কাব্যগ্রন্থ Paper Boat (কাগজের নৌকো) প্রায় ছয় দশকের কবিতার সংকলন, যেখানে তার শুরুর দিকের কবিতা থেকে শুরু করে সাম্প্রতিক কবিতাগুলি পর্যন্ত অন্তর্ভুক্ত। এই সংকলনে তার ১৪টি কাব্যগ্রন্থ থেকে বাছাই করা কবিতা রয়েছে, এবং দুটি সম্পূর্ণ কাব্যগ্রন্থ—Power Politics (১৯৭১) এবং Dearly (২০২০)—এতে পুনর্মুদ্রিত হয়েছে। কবিতাগুলিতে অ্যাটউড আমাদের অস্তিত্বের ক্ষণস্থায়ীত্ব এবং মানব প্রকৃতির ভয়াবহতা তুলে ধরেন, যা মূলত প্রেম, ভয়, এবং বাস্তবতার গভীর সত্যকে তুলে ধরে।
পাঠক এখানে পাবেন অ্যাটউডের অনন্য রূপান্তরিত কল্পনা, যেখানে কবিতাগুলি প্রার্থনা, অভিশাপ, বা মন্ত্রের মতো কাজ করে। তার কবিতায় আমরা প্রকৃতির নৃশংসতা এবং মানব অভিজ্ঞতার বৈপরীত্যকে বারবার দেখতে পাবো। অ্যাটউডের লেখা যেমন সাহসী, তেমনি নির্মম; তিনি কোনো কিছু লুকিয়ে না রেখে, সবকিছু স্পষ্ট করে বলেন।

Paper Boat (কাগজের নৌকো) শুধু একটি কাব্যগ্রন্থ নয়, এটি একই সাথে সাহস, জ্ঞান এবং বাস্তবতার একটি নান্দনিক প্রদর্শন। বইটির শেষাংশে কিছু নতুন এবং অপ্রকাশিত কবিতা রয়েছে, যেগুলি বর্তমান সময়ের প্রতিফলন ঘটায়। শেষ দুটি কবিতা “Thank You” (ধন্যবাদ), “Now” (এখন), এবং “Love” (ভালোবাসা) শব্দের চারপাশে আবর্তিত, যা পুরো বইটিকে গভীর মানবিকতায় পূর্ণ করে। অ্যাটউডের কাজ একদিকে যেমন সরল, অন্যদিকে জটিল, এবং Paper Boat (কাগজের নৌকো) সেই জটিলতা ও আনন্দের প্রতিচ্ছবি।

Paper Boat
Margaret Atwood
Alfred A Knopf
2024

[T. C. C. · Rating 5 out of 5]

I checked this hefty tome (over 600 hundred pages of collected poetry) out of my library with a 28-day check-out period. Despite that graceful period of offered leisure reading, I will have to probably purchase a copy of this massive book, because despite its elegance and wonder, that much poetry can't be consumed all at once. But it says something that I was so enchanted by Atwood's verse, that I will purchase a copy of the book in order to spend more time with it, luxuriating again and again in its short-line poetry, discovering the mind and life of this amazing woman and her fabulous turn of phrase and literary imagery, her economy of words that, regardless, expose grand storytelling capability.

My only wish was that there was perhaps an introduction or a foreward, either by Atwood herself or one of her admirers, perhaps detailing some background, some essential biography that might shine a bit of light on the more cryptic or inventive verse (or the surprising works that make one wonder at the hugeness of life that was possibly experienced). Please forgive the comparison, but reading this poetry was a little like reading an oblique obituary, with only hints of a lifetime of stories to digest, but leaving us wondering and consumed with want for more detail.

Instead, one must rely on the context clues offered in the "Acknowledgements" at the end of this monstrous folio, and from the poetry itself—which virtually covers Atwood's ENTIRE writing life, from youthful late nights in coffee shop open-mic reading opportunities, and ambitious self-published "zine"-type mimeographed booklets, through the harrowing trials and tribulations of being a female literary fictionalist writer trying to break glass ceilings in the publishing industry, through a later life of awards, speaking engagements, best-selling fame, and household and social recognition. (There are biographical works out there—for instance the 1998 biography by Nathalie Cooke—and Atwood, herself, seems to have a reputation of generosity when it comes to offering interviews, if one were so inclined to prepare oneself for a background education on Atwood's life previous to diving into this book of verse from her hand.)

What has been consumed by this reader so far is magnificent. I look forward to spending more time with her unique style of poetics.

[Cheryl · Rating 3 out of 5]

“A Soul, Geologically”
“The longer we stay here the harder
it is for me to see you.
Your outline, skin
that marks you off
melts in this light
and from behind your face
the unknown areas appear:
hills yellow-pelted, dried earth
bubbles, or thrust up
steeply as knees
the sky a flat blue desert,
these spaces you fill
with their own emptiness.
Your shape wavers, glares
like heath above the toad,
then you merge and extend:
you have gone,
in front of me there is a stone ridge.
Which of these forms
have you taken:
hill, tree clawed
to the rock, fallen rocks worn
and rounded by the wind
You are the wind,
you contain me
I walk in the white silences
of your mind, remembering
the way it is millions of years before
on the wide floor of the sea
while my eyes lift like continents
to the sun and erode slowly.”

A Boat

Evening comes on and the hills thicken; red and yellow bleaching out of the leaves. The chill pines grow their shadows. Below them the water stills itself, a sunset shivering in it. One more going down to join the others. Now the lake expands and closes in, both. The blackness that keeps itself under the surface in daytime emerges from it like mist or as mist. Distance vanishes, the absence of distance pushes against the eyes. There is no seeing the lake, only the outlines of the hills which are almost identical, familiar to me as sleep, shores unfolding upon shores in their contours of slowed breathing.”


found poem:

From her all springs arise
To her all falls return
The articulate flesh, the singing bone
Root flower and fern,
sea-smoothed, sea-completed.
They enclosed what they intended
to mean in shapes as random
and necessary as the shapes of words.
Everything’s brighter just before,
and it’s just before always,
even in the deep subarctic of space
beyond meaning, even among
the never alive, to approach is to shine.
layer on layer of drowned time falling away.
This is how I learned to steer through
darkness by no stars. The lake, vast and
dimensionless, doubles everything,
the stars, the boulders, itself, even the darkness
that you can walk so long in it becomes light.
Thought: this is what it is, to be part of the landscape.

[Kaitlyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Atwood’s poetry comes with a sharp bite; just like her novels. The strong voice in her books packs a bigger punch in her shorter pieces. I found myself rereading quite a few of them to find new things to marvel at. The sections that stood out the most on this read through were Power and Politics, Snake Poems, and Uncollected Poems 2. I just know that I’d love other sections more when going through different phases in life. I wanted to set so many aside in my personal collection of favorites. If any future readers want to start somewhere, listed below is a pared down version of my favorites and why I liked them:

“eden is a zoo”
-She takes a craft to a new level, potent color and imagery

“dreams of the animals”
-Starts so lovely and sweet…then…oh man, it hurt my heart, something to say

“siren song”
-it does exactly what it’s fated to do, this one is so, so clever

“marrying the hangman”
-a story-like poem, Atwood’s voice for women is strong within it, simmering rage and exasperation

“Postcard”
-strong visuals, something we’re all familiar with turned more honest

“after herclitus”
-I can’t capture this one with my own words, its potency stays with me though

“orpheus (1)”
-it’s own little retelling of Eurydice

“the last rational man”
-another one like a short story, we all play pretend

“small book”
-a short journey that I love, great flow

“opera villains”
-short character story, fun

“Thirty”
-just because I turned 30 this month and could relate. It felt like a small piece of wisdom for me

Thank you Netgalley for the ARC! These are really fantastic.