Selected Poems: 1965-1975
Atwood is considered by many to be among Canada's finest writers, and her new collection should support that opinion. Thematically complex, her poetry is difficult to categorize: when she writes about Canada, as in "Four Small Elegies," she goes beyond a regional perspective; and though a feminist, she does not necessarily evoke pacifism. Violence, she discovers, is implicit in human nature, as shown in the snake poem "She": "He's our idea of a bad time, we are his./ I say he out of habit. It could be she. " Fatalistic and mordant, her diction may be post-modern but is neither experimental nor obscure. Ivan Arguelles, Univ. of California at Berkeley Lib.Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.