Paper Boat: New and Selected Poems, 1961–2023

The iconic Atwood (Dearly) has produced nearly as many volumes of poetry as fiction. Here, she creates a grand showcase of verse selected from more than a dozen collections and includes about two dozen uncollected poems. The result is classic Atwood—conversational, nearly insouciant, yet with a fierceness of perception and conviction that cuts to the bone—and though her style may have loosened up somewhat along the way, it seems to have emerged whole early on. So have her themes, both topical (a concern for women’s issues, animal rights, and the consequences of white settlement and warfare, for example) and personal, with the inevitable wrap-up of life toward the end (“We can’t even kill our previous selves”). Mythology and folktale often shape the narratives, which display both a novelist’s flare for scenario and a poet’s flare for distillation. Though the work is massive, selections from each of her past poetry collections tell a clear story; those from Power Politics, for instance, probe relationships (“you fit into me / like a hook into an eye // a fish hook / an open eye”). And despite the seriousness of intent, Atwood can be funny (“Nothing but baritones will do. / I’ve had it with tenors”).