The Door: Poems - Softcover

Atwood, Margaret; Larmore, Phoebe

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0547237707 ISBN 13: 9780547237701

Publisher: Ecco, 2023

Synopsis

The Door, Margaret Atwood's first book of poetry since Morning in the Burned House, is a magnificent achievement. Here in paperback for the first time, these fifty lucid, urgent poems range in tone from lyric to ironic to mediative to prophetic, and in subject from the personal to the political, viewed in its broadest sense. They investigate the mysterious writing of poetry itself, as well as the passage of time and our shared sense of mortality. Brave and compassionate, The Door interrogates the certainties that we build our lives on, and reminds us once again of Margaret Atwood's unique accomplishments as one of the finest and most celebrated writers of our time.

About this title

About the Author:

MARGARET ATWOOD is the author of more than forty books of fiction, poetry, and critical essays. In addition to The Handmaid’s Tale (now a Hulu series) and its sequel The Testaments, her novels include The Blind Assassin (winner of the Booker Prize), Alias Grace (winner of the Giller Prize in Canada and the Premio Mondello in Italy), The Robber Bride, Cat’s Eye, The Penelopiad, The Heart Goes Last, and Hag-Seed, a novel revisitation of Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, for the Hogarth Shakespeare Project. Her latest book of short stories is Stone Mattress: Nine Tales.  She is also the author of the graphic novel Angel Cat­bird (with cocreator Johnnie Christmas). Margaret Atwood lives in Toronto with writer Graeme Gibson.
 

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

GASOLINEShivering in the almost-drizzleinside the wooden outboard,nose over gunwale,I watched it drip and spreadon the sheenless water:the brightest thing in wartime,a slick of rainbow,ephemeral as insect wings,green, blue, red, and pink,my shimmering private sideshow.Was this my best toy, then?This toxic smudge, this overspillfrom a sloppy gascan filledwith essence of danger?I knew that it was poison,its beauty an illusion:I could spell flammable.But still, I loved the smell:so alien, a whiffof starstuff.I would have liked to drink it,inhale its iridescence.As if I could.That's how gods lived: as if.  EUROPE ON $5 A DAYSunrise. The thin pocked sheetsare being washed. The city's old,but new to me, and thereforestrange, and therefore fresh.Everything's clear, but flat –even the oculist's dingy eyes,even the butcher's, with its painted horse,its trays of watery entrailsand slabs of darkening flesh.I walk along,looking at everything equally.I've got all I own in this bag.I've cut myself off.I can feel the placewhere I used to be attached.It's raw, as when you grateyour finger. It's a shredded messof images. It hurts.But where exactly on meis this torn-off stem?Now here, now there.Meanwhile the other girl,the one with the memory,is coming nearer and nearer.She's catching up to me,trailing behind her, like red smoke,the rope we share.

About this edition

• Publisher: Ecco
• Publication date: 2023
• ISBN 10: 0547237707
• ISBN 13: 9780547237701
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 128