Product Details
The Door

The Door
By Margaret Atwood

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Product Description

The Door, Margaret Atwood’s first book of poetry since her award-winning Morning in the Burned House, is a magnificent achievement. These fifty lucid, urgent poems range in tone from lyric to ironic to meditative 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.

Product Details

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #525579 in Books
  • Published on: 2007-11-07
  • Original language: English
  • Number of items: 1
  • Binding: Hardcover
  • 128 pages

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
The first book of poems in 12 years from the now world-famous Canadian author (The Handmaid's Tale) combines an older writer's reflections on aging with the dire warnings-political, environmental and moral-familiar from Atwood's recent fiction. Short lines and deliberate, balanced phrases consider how "my mother dwindles and dwindles/ and lives and lives," how senior citizens hike and trek across tundra, and how privileged citizens of rich nations might understand refugees from far-off wars. "Owl and Pussycat, Some Years Later"-the longest poem in the book, the wittiest and likely the best-retells the familiar rhyme as a parable of late-career poets, rueful and "no longer semi-immortal," yet still conversing, still writing, as they go on rowing "out past the last protecting/ sandbar." Other verse shows Atwood-who began as a poet, despite her fame as a novelist-looking at the climate for new poetry amid the sometimes funny parochialism of its audiences (in Canada or anywhere). Yet the predominant notes are fiercely grim: ice melts and cracks, mammals head towards extinction, "the hurt child will bite you... And its blood will seep into the water/ and you will drink it every day." One page compares all poets everywhere to violinists on the Titanic. Another declares, truthfully, "That's what I do:/ I tell dark stories/ before and after they come true."
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Review
"Atwood's poems are short, glistening with terse, bright images." (New York Times )

About the Author

MARGARET ATWOOD'S poetry, like her fiction — including The Handmaid’s Tale and the Booker-winning The Blind Assassin -- is known and acclaimed around the world. Her last collection, Morning in the Burned House, won the Trillium Book Award in 1995. The author of more than forty works of fiction, poetry, critical essays, and books for children, Atwood has received top honors and awards in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom, and many other countries. She lives in Toronto. In 2008, Atwood was awarded the prestigious Prince of Asturias Award Laureate for Letters, considered to be the Spanish-language Nobel.

Customer Reviews

UNSENTIMENTAL ELEGIES4
Margaret Atwood's THE DOOR could very well have been subtitled UNSENTIMENTAL ELEGIES: the same clear-eyed, sometimes caustic observations that give her novels their energy and force are also everywhere apparent in this strong collection of short poems.

At times intensely personal, Atwood's poems seek to find a common thread of humanity in their narration of such every day tragedies as the death of a beloved cat, or the slow onset of her mother's senility. Always alive to the possibility that suffering can distort our humanity, render us blind and selfish, Atwood shows us that we must learn to be sentimental in only the best and highest sense of that word.

Altogether THE DOOR is a good solid collection that is perfectly in keeping with Atwood's masterful, often inspired fiction. Recommended.

Atwood returns to poetry5
From the cat in the freezer to dealing with her grief you will want to own this book to read and re-read.