Hello all, and happy book review day.
February is generally cold here. We've had extreme cold warnings recently, so cold our school buses did not run two days in a row.
Do you know how cold it has to be for rural mountain school buses in Canada to not run? Two days in a row?!
Anyway, the end of February is almost - sort of - kind of in sight, and then it is March. It's still cold in March (it is not uncommon to have blizzards here in April or May even) but spring is at least on the mind then.
Spring, with birds, like the beautiful birds on the cover of Margaret Atwood's most recent publication, a book of poetry entitled "Dearly". So many of the poems have their ties to nature, and spring seems full of the warmth and life of so many of the topics - animals, for example, or picking blackberries, maybe. Yet the poems are clearly written in the winter years of Atwood's experiences. They feel like winter. Sad, cold, maybe lonely, but still with beauty and grace.
Death was clearly on Atwood's mind in writing these poems. Death and aging. And no wonder: her partner, Graeme, passed away in 2019, and the book is dedicated to him "in absentia".
I think those themes of death and aging make this book applicable to different readers; I want to return to them as I get older, as I can identify with the aging themes personally more; hopefully, I inhabit the same honesty and grace and wisdom that Atwood's voice embodies in these poems.
It's a vast and varied collection, with topics ranging from mushrooms in September to missing women. Each poem is beautifully-written. I almost feel like that is a redundant statement, after saying the poems are written by Margaret Atwood. Of course they are beautifully-written... it's Margaret Atwood.
So, here is where I am going to be honest: I do not read a whole lot of poetry outside of work. Maybe, maybe one collection a year. And I haven't reread many collections. Pablo Neruda, Earle Birney, Shakespearean sonnets...
I have read Atwood's poetry before; I even teach a few of her older poems to my students every year. Variations on the Word Love is probably my favourite poem of all time. And while I love her writing - pretty much everything I've ever read by her, actually - I do tend to prefer her novels.
But this. This is something else entirely.
“That room has been static for me so long: an emptiness. a void. a silence containing an unheard story ready for me to unlock. Let there be plot.”
I picked this to be my first read of 2021 (after starting 2020 with The Testaments, also by Atwood), and I have already come back to some of the poems. Atwood takes such care with her words, her images, her readers' hearts. The most effective description I can think of to apply to these poems is sincerity.
Yes, she gives us surprising descriptions. Meanings. Imagery. But it is all so sincere. Whether or not that is intended, I don't know, and I'm not sure that matters. But these poems matter. They're beautiful and, yes, heartbreaking, and when I read them, I feel something. Many somethings.
If you were a song
What song would you be?
Would you be the voice that sings,
Would you be the music?
When I am singing this song for you
You are not empty air
You are here,
One breath and then another:
You are here with me...
And if nothing else, isn't that the point of poetry?
“The world that we think we see
is only our best guess.”
Are you a poetry fan? What's your favourite poem?
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