The Socially Conscious Poetry of Margaret Atwood

I should start off by saying I first read Margaret Atwood the fiction writer, reading several of her novels before finally settling down to read a book of her poetry. What surprised me most about True Stories: Poems, was that the poems were actually relatively short and spare – a style I wouldn’t have expected from this author, whose novels are lush and prosy…and long.

According to the back cover of the collection, “True Stories intensifies and extends many of the themes in Margaret Atwood’s critically acclaimed novel Bodily Harm: the necessity of bearing witness to the crimes of repressive political societies and the redemptive power of friendship.” Since I have not read Bodily Harm, I will react to these poems as they stand on their own.

Atwood’s voice is intimate and compelling in these poems. Being “true stories,” they come across sometimes as confession, sometimes as reporting occurrences about which we need to know. These lines from “Postcard” are a good example of Atwood’s confessional voice:

I’m thinking about you. What else can I say?
The palm trees on the reverse
are a delusion; so is the pink sand.
What we have are the usual
fractured coke bottles and the smell
of backed-up drains, too sweet,
like a mango on the verge
of rot, which we have also.

Although many of the “true stories” related by Atwood in these poems are self-referential, there are many that serve to show us the grim ugly faces of people who do things we don’t like to think about, sad circumstances, stark reality. One of the best examples of this is the long, multi-segmented “Notes Towards a Poem That Can Never Be Written.” It’s difficult to pull just a few lines from this poem, but I will try to show you a couple of the ones that really struck me – the “goose bump” lines:

There is no poem you can write
about it, the sandpits
where so many were buried
& unearthed, the unendurable
pain still traced on their skins.

This did not happen last year
or forty years ago but last week.
This has been happening,
this happens.

and these lines:

The facts of this world seen clearly
are seen through tears;
why tell me then
there is something wrong with my eyes?

To see clearly and without flinching,
without turning away,
this is agony, the eyes taped open
two inches from the sun.

Atwood’s poems often speak to their readers in imperatives, instructing the reader to wake up, take notice. As in these lines from “A Women’s Issue,” which is an extraordinarily political poem:

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