Dearly

Dearly: New Poems 

by Margaret Atwood
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This slim volume is a mixture of poems about large concerns (the environment mostly) and personal, intimate moments. Some of the poems are about love and loss (not surprising given the 2019 death of Graeme Gibson) and are very sad. 

Atwood is a skilled writer and her poems show that as much as her novels do. There were a few lines that really struck me:

• "...and the parents who had not yet abandoned us to take their chances in the ground." (from"Winter Vacations")
• "First taste of sheer ambrosia! Though mixed with ash and the shards of destruction as Heaven always is, if you read the texts closely." (from "Coconut")

The poems that resonated most for me were "Salt" which questions the advice not to look back; "Carving the Jacks" which uses language to play with the reader's expectations as something we all know is described; "Sad Utensils" mourning the loss of words from our speech; and the title poem "Dearly"which beautifully captures the impossibility of describing the past to someone who wasn't there. 

I am counting this toward the Canadian Book Challenge.