Dearly: New Poems by Margaret Atwood
“The hand on your shoulder. The almost-hand: Poetry, coming to claim you.”
Dearly: New Poems (2020) is Margaret Atwood’s first collection of poetry in over a decade and one that’s keenly aware of its status as her “late poems.” The book is deceptively thin with a pretty cover and delicate title, suggesting something romantic and lighthearted. This assumption could not be further from the truth. Dearly fearlessly explores tragedy, death, old age and grief with a profound ethical conscience that demands readers take responsibility for the things that matter to them.
In the introduction, Atwood describes her writing process: keeping scribbles of paper in drawers and revisiting them later. She describes the writing of her teenage and college years in her typical witty manner:
“Most were pretty bad but there were a lot of them. These poems had many subjects: peonies, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, winter, severed heads. The usual.”
This collection is an amalgamation of such drawer scribbles written between 2008 and 2019, introducing us to how Atwood’s outlook has (and hasn’t) changed over the years. She still keeps a keen eye on contemporary developments regarding feminism, climate change, and modern society’s peculiarities at large.
Divided into five parts, each section contains around ten poems that don’t always stick within one cohesive theme. Many of the verses start with deceptive lightness but end on deeply thoughtful notes. In the first two sections, the focus is on interpersonal relationships, memory, vulnerability, and loss. In a poem about her late mother, Atwood ruminates on losing the people we love as we used to know them and her exposure to grief:
How tall she used to be,
how we’ve all dwindled
“Songs for Murdered Sisters,” a poem written in memory of the murdered sister of singer Joshua Hopkins, dips into feminist commentary and speculation - topics we know Atwood for well. This poem spans eight pages, moving through stages of grief:
So many sisters killed
Over the years, thousands of years.
Killed by fearful men
Who wanted to be taller.
Apart from one or two other poems, Atwood doesn’t dive explicitly into a gendered commentary, as though she is steering away from the themes that have made her a household name. Instead, the collection moves more toward universal experiences and around the middle of the book, Atwood meditates on human nature at large and the danger we pose to the world. She writes about the ethical cost of progress and how the things we create often aid our planet’s destruction. She questions whether we realise what we’re doing:
And the magic machine grinds on and on
spewing out mountains of whatnot
and we throw it all into the sea
as we have always done
and this will not end well
Death casts a long shadow over this collection, with Atwood actively setting a place at the table to invite it in and converse. At 81 years old, it should come as no surprise that mortality and the crumbs of life are keenly on her mind. At times, this is light and warming, but mostly I found there to be a lot of darkness, with many poems recounting unsaid conversations and slights. She shows how life and death are intertwined, and this connection weaves its way through much of the collection:
If there were no emptiness,
there would be no life.
In the final poems, Atwood shifts to writing about old age: the deterioration of her mind and body, disconcerting solitude and her fading recollections of loved ones. She talks about her journey through this intensely personal yet universal experience, and these poems were the best in the book for me. They’re intimate and take on a tone of deep urgency and profundity, Atwood playing the role of a grandparent, lovingly imparting her wisdom - harsh though it might be at times.
This is a moving and tender collection, one that seduces you with its wry charms and encourages you to unpack its messages about life and mortality. It also moves through a playful array of topics from fairy tales, Frida Kahlo, aliens, cats with dementia and more. Those familiar with her poetry will welcome this new chapter of verse. Atwood stares death in the face and instead of flinching, arms us with a roar of dignity and honour:
It’s late; it’s very late;
Too late for dancing.
Still, sing what you can.
Turn up the light: sing on,
sing: On.
Elaine Mead is a freelance writer and book reviewer, currently residing in Hobart, Tasmania. She is passionate about the ways we can use literature to learn from our experiences to become more authentic versions of ourselves and obsessed with showing you photos of her Dachshund puppy. You can find her online under @wordswithelaine.
