Paper Boat
New and Selected Poems
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
*A Times Literary Supplement and Financial Times Book of the Year 2024*
An extraordinary career-spanning collection from one of the most revered poets and storytellers of our age
Tracing the legacy of Margaret Atwood – a writer who has fundamentally shaped our 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.
‘We should regard Atwood as a poet first and foremost – just one who happens to be a highly regarded novelist’ Sunday Herald
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This expansive and admirable collection from Atwood (after Dearly) captures the prolific Canadian novelist, essayist, and poet's brightest poems. Fans of Atwood can witness the evolution of her poetic mind, teasing out themes of fantasy, nature, and the female experience that she has explored throughout her career. "Sons branch out, but/ one woman leads to another," she writes. Atwood is a master of setting an eerie stage quickly, as she does in "This is a Photograph of Me" from 1966, which describes a picture from the perspective of the drowned: "I am in the lake in the centre/ of the picture, just under the surface." Elsewhere, the head of a hen that has just been cut from its body watches itself, "a single/ flopping breast,/ muttering about life/ in its thickening red voice." She writes from a wide array of perspectives: Canadian settler and writer Susanna Moodie, goddesses, a tin woodwoman, Ava Gardner reincarnated as a magnolia, and animals. Atwood's recent poems are confident and often funny. In "Thirty," the octogenarian asks, "Do you ever reach a point at which/ you don't find the children hilarious?/ By children, I mean–you understand—/ anyone younger than you." Atwood proves yet again that she's still at the top of her game.
