The Journals of Susanna Moodie: Poems - Softcover

Margaret Atwood

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0195401697 ISBN 13: 9780195401691

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1970

Synopsis

This cycle of poems is perhaps the most memorable evocation in modern Canadian literature of the myth of the wilderness, the immigrant experience, and the alienating and schizophrenic effects of the colonial mentality. Since it was first published in 1970 it has not only acquired the stature of a classic but, reprinted many times, become the best-known extended work in Canadian poetry.

Susanna Moodie (1805-85) emigrated from England in 1832 to Upper Canada, where she settled on a farm with her husband. She wrote several books in Canada, notably Roughing It in the Bush, a famous account of pioneering that is still widely read. In poems about the arrival and the Moodies' seven years in the bush, which were followed by a more civilized ilfe in Belleville, and about Mrs Moodie in old age and then after death - in the present, when she observes the twentieth century destroying her past and its meaning - Margaret Atwood has created haunting meditations on an English gentlewoman's confrontation with the wilderness, and compelling variations on the themes of dislocation and alienation, nature and civilization.

The poems are supplemented by Margaret Atwood's collages and an 'Afterword' in which the poet says: 'We are all imigrants to this place even if we were born here....'

About this title

Review:

The poetic/artistic exploration of what it means to find yourself thrown into a hostile environment, these poems by Margaret Atwood and silk-screen illustrations by Charles Pachter are based on the journals of Canadian pioneer Susanna Moodie. The setting allows Atwood to write cutting lines about the fundamental tensions in creating and defining a self. One such tension, the assertion of will on the world as well as on one's self, set against the spirit-crushing tribulations of loneliness and hopelessness, is especially electric. The Journals of Susanna Moodie is a beautiful and hypnotic book.

From the Inside Flap:

The landmark collaboration of two pre-eminent Canadian artists in an attractive, affordable format.

As fledgling artists in their respective fields, Margaret Atwood and Charles Pachter were enthusiastic collaborators in a unique art form, the livre d'artiste ? the marriage of original graphic work with literary text. Beginning in the mid-sixties, while both were still students, they worked together on five limited-edition handmade books, volumes of Atwood?s poetry with Pachter?s interpretive artwork. The culmination of their collaboration, the work that is considered their masterpiece, is The Journals of Susanna Moodie. In her reading of Susanna Moodie?s chronicles of pioneer life in nineteenth-century Canada, Atwood found the haunting and timeless themes that still obsess us.

The poems of The Journals of Susanna Moodie were first published in 1970 in a standard format. This sequence of poems is regarded as a classic, in addition to being connected with her later novel, Alias Grace. In 1980, Pachter was able to add his own vibrant, evocative images and create the version they had dreamt of: a hand-set, hand-printed illustrated limited edition of 120 numbered copies.

This popular edition is a faithful re-creation of the original, accompanied by an introductory memoir by Pachter, describing his friendship with Atwood and the creative process behind this breathtaking work, and a foreword by David Staines, who pays homage to Atwood, Pachter, and Moodie and their central places in our art and literature.

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 1970
• ISBN 10: 0195401697
• ISBN 13: 9780195401691
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 64
• Illustrator: Margaret Atwood