Celebrated as a major novelist throughout the English-speaking world, Atwood has also written eleven volumes of poetry. Houghton Mifflin is proud to have published SELECTED POEMS, 1965-1975, a volume of selections from Atwood's poetry of that decade.
MARGARET ATWOOD'S poetry, like her fiction — including The Handmaid’s Tale and the Booker-winning The Blind Assassin -- is known and acclaimed around the world. Her last collection, Morning in the Burned House, won the Trillium Book Award in 1995. The author of more than forty works of fiction, poetry, critical essays, and books for children, Atwood has received top honors and awards in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom, and many other countries. She lives in Toronto. In 2008, Atwood was awarded the prestigious Prince of Asturias Award Laureate for Letters, considered to be the Spanish-language Nobel.
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. Ivan Arguelles, Univ. of California at Berkeley Lib. Copyright 1987 Cahners Business Information.
