Imprint: Chatto & Windus
Published: 10/11/2020
ISBN: 9781784743895
Length: 144 Pages
Dimensions: 230mm x 15mm x 150mm
Weight: 276g
RRP: £14.99
GOODREADS CHOICE AWARDS 2020 -- BEST POETRY
The collection of a lifetime from the bestselling novelist, poet - and cultural phenomenon.
Before she became one of the world's most important and loved novelists, Margaret Atwood was a poet. Dearly is her first collection in over a decade. It brings together many of her most recognisable and celebrated themes, but distilled -- from minutely perfect descriptions of the natural world to startlingly witty encounters with aliens, from pressing political issues to myth and legend.
By turns moving, playful and wise, the poems gathered in Dearly are about absences and endings, ageing and retrospection, but also about gifts and renewals. They explore bodies and minds in flux, as well as the everyday objects and rituals that embed us in the present. Werewolves, sirens and dreams make their appearance, as do various forms of animal life and fragments of our damaged environment.
Dearly is a pure Atwood delight, and long-term readers and new fans alike will treasure its insight, empathy and humour.
'A new volume of poetry by the writer of wit and optimism . . . Just when we needed her most' Gentlewoman
*BOOK OF THE YEAR OBSERVER, FINANCIAL TIMES *
Imprint: Chatto & Windus
Published: 10/11/2020
ISBN: 9781784743895
Length: 144 Pages
Dimensions: 230mm x 15mm x 150mm
Weight: 276g
RRP: £14.99
Margaret Atwood has always been a poet; her poetry collections make visible the taproot of the wry wise metaphysic that runs through her fiction and essays, and in a precarious time her new collection, Dearly, is a source of uncompromising elemental warmth
Atwood's first poetry collection in over a decade is intimate, lingering delicately between the human and the natural, and this world and the next
Atwood is surely one of our planet's most priceless commodities
She turns her eye to the past, to nature, to fantasy, to current affairs, all with the calm eye of a writer who has nothing to prove
Here we see Atwood at the height of her poetic powers
This collection of poems is a reckoning with the past that comes from a place of wisdom and control . . . You can almost hear her speaking voice, see the twinkle in her eye . . . wonderfully observed
This whole collection stands as a mighty demonstration of how great poetry can embody and celebrate the sheer vibrancy and beauty of life, in the face of the most profound sorrow and terror. Read these poems aloud, read them carefully, read them with joy and tears; savour the raw power of their rhythms and assonances, and the sheer mastery with which Atwood, at the height of her powers, transforms anger and grief into glinting beauty and brilliance. And then ask yourself whether, if humanity survives, any future historian could ever find a richer, more courageous or more truthful account of what it was, and how it felt, to be alive in these times; and give yourself the answer - no, most truly, she could not
She's become world famous for The Handmaid's Tale, and jointly won the 2019 Booker Prize for The Testaments, but Canadian author Margaret Atwood was once better known as a poet . . . this new volume brings together some of her favourite themes, from zombies, werewolves and aliens, to the passage of time and the most pressing political issues of the day
A poignant yet playful collection of verse, about endings and departures, it is sliced with clever, sharp humour
I finished this collection deeply impressed by Atwood's capacity for powerful, lyric description