Dearly: New Poems

Elegiac yet cautionary, Atwood’s first new collection since 2007’s The Door revolves around themes of mortality, environmental jeopardy, memory, feminism, and loss. These carefully tuned lyric poems, many lightly rhymed, often bear bitter witness to humankind’s self-destructive treatment of both planet (“Whatever we touch turns red”) and spirit (“we don’t have minds/ as such these days, but tiny snarls/ of firefly neural pathways/ signalling no/yes/no”). A lifelong activist, Atwood nicknames our geologic age The Plasticine, characterized by a civilization “spewing out mountains of whatnot,” filling oceans with a “neo-seaweed/ of torn bags, cast wrappers, tangled rope/ shredded by tides and rocks.” The final section of poems, haunted by “the shape of an absence,” are poignant with the memory of novelist Graeme Gibson, her partner for nearly a half-century who passed in 2019.