8.21.2024 | Wednesday

Dearly

category: Book Reviews
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Dearlytitle: Dearly: New Poems
author: Margaret Atwood
published: 10 November 2020
publisher: Ecco
genre(s): poetry
pages: 122
source: bought
format: eBook
buy/shelve it: Amazon | B&N | BookBub | BookHype | Goodreads

rating: four-stars

the blurb

In Dearly, Margaret Atwood’s first collection of poetry in over a decade, Atwood addresses themes such as love, loss, the passage of time, the nature of nature and - zombies. Her new poetry is introspective and personal in tone, but wide-ranging in topic. In poem after poem, she casts her unique imagination and unyielding, observant eye over the landscape of a life carefully and intuitively lived.
While many are familiar with Margaret Atwood’s fiction—including her groundbreaking and bestselling novels The Handmaid’s TaleThe TestamentsOryx and Crake, among others—she has, from the beginning of her career, been one of our most significant contemporary poets. And she is one of the very few writers equally accomplished in fiction and poetry.  This collection is a stunning achievement that will be appreciated by fans of her novels and poetry readers alike.


  • a few notes
  • review

POV: n/a
spice: 0🔥
language: 0🤬

There is a very clear overall theme to this collection of poems by Atwood… and that is death. Death, grief, and sadness. Poetry is an odd thing. Sometimes “enjoyed” is not the right verb to describe the reading and interpretation of it. That is the case with this collection. The poems are often dark and depressing, morbid. So yes, “enjoyment” isn’t quite the correct word. But they were very compelling, even if I often felt disquieted as I read and absorbed them.

The poems are varied, moving from the death/grief of people, to zombies, to space, to even launguage. It was a fascinating journey along the spectrum of what death, grief, and loss look like. One of the many things I enjoyed was the juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated topics within a single poem, the way they are woven together, somehow making perfect sense with Atwood’s words.


About Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood was born in 1939 in Ottawa and grew up in northern Ontario, Quebec, and Toronto. She received her undergraduate degree from Victoria College at the University of Toronto and her master’s degree from Radcliffe College.

Throughout her writing career, Margaret Atwood has received numerous awards and honourary degrees. She is the author of more than thirty-five volumes of poetry, children’s literature, fiction, and non-fiction and is perhaps best known for her novels, which include The Edible Woman (1970), The Handmaid’s Tale (1983), The Robber Bride (1994), Alias Grace (1996), and The Blind Assassin, which won the prestigious Booker Prize in 2000. Atwood’s dystopic novel, Oryx and Crake, was published in 2003. The Tent (mini-fictions) and Moral Disorder (short stories) both appeared in 2006. Her most recent volume of poetry, The Door, was published in 2007. Her non-fiction book, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth ­ in the Massey series, appeared in 2008, and her most recent novel, The Year of the Flood, in the autumn of 2009. Ms. Atwood’s work has been published in more than forty languages, including Farsi, Japanese, Turkish, Finnish, Korean, Icelandic and Estonian. In 2004 she co-invented the Long Pen TM.

Margaret Atwood currently lives in Toronto with writer Graeme Gibson.

Associations: Margaret Atwood was President of the Writers’ Union of Canada from May 1981 to May 1982, and was President of International P.E.N., Canadian Centre (English Speaking) from 1984-1986. She and Graeme Gibson are the Joint Honourary Presidents of the Rare Bird Society within BirdLife International. Ms. Atwood is also a current Vice-President of PEN International.

Rating Report
plot
four-stars
characters
four-stars
writing
four-stars
pacing
four-stars
Overall: four-stars

reading challenges:

  • 2024 52 Books Reading Challenge
  • 2024 Alphabet Soup Reading Challenge
  • 2024 Alphabet Soup: Author Edition Reading Challenge
  • 2024 Linz the Bookworm Reading Challenge
  • 2024 PopSugar Reading Challenge
::spread the love::

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