"The Door" by Margaret Atwood (Virago, 2007)

Over 100 pages of poetry, several poems coming from Poetry Ireland Review and Ontario Review.

Here's how "Year of the hen" (the third poem) begins -

This is the year of sorting, of throwing out, of giving back, of sifting through the heaps, the piles, the drifts, the dunes, the sediments, or less poetically, the shelves, the trunks, the closets, boxes, corners in the cellar, nooks and cupboards - the junk, in other words, that's blown in here, or else been saved

Too slow, surely. The start of "Mourning for cats" is no better -

We get sentimental over dead animals. We turn maudlin. But only those with fur, only those who look like us, at least a little. Those with big eyes, eyes that face front. Those with smallish noses or modest beaks. No one laments a spider

There are some poems that could be making fun of poets or their audience -

• "Go away, we say -/ and take your boring sadness./ You're not wanted here./ You've forgotten how to tell us/ how sublime we are./ How love is the answer:/ we always liked that one" - "The poets hang on"
• "he's doing our confessions for us ... you keep on watching, as he flays himself/ in an ecstasy of self-reproach ... But just as you're feeling tricked/ his voice cuts abruptly ... and you join in the applause" - "Poetry reading"
• "Despite my singed feathers/ and this tattered scroll I haul around,/ I'm not an angel./ I'm only a shadow,/ the shadow of your desires. I'm only a granter of wishes." - "enough of these discouragements"
• In "The singer of owls", an owl comforts a poet by pointing out that owls too sing out of necessity, when few others are awake to hear.
• "Boat song" is "rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic" plus "fiddling while Rome burns" applied none too subtly to poets.

It's mostly poetry for non-poets, though the odd phrase puzzles - e.g. "the grassblades whispering like ions" p.30. "Heart" isn't bad. "You children cut their hand .." is better, though the punchline is telegraphed. "Owl and pussycat, some years later" might be my favourite, were it shorter than 6 pages. In "Ten o'clock news", "The shot bird topples from the air, the others note it: they need to know what's going on. Tree leaves rustle, deer twitch their tails, rabbits swivel their ears. The grass-eaters crouch, the scavengers lick their teeth" which sets us up for "What alerts us? What are we feeding on?" I like following her train of thought in "The weather" ("We used to watch the birds; now we watch the weather"). "Ice Palace" is a pleasant read, comparing a hotel to a fairy-tale castle - secret rooms, etc. I like "War photo 2", "The nature of Gothic" ("I show you a girl running at night/ among trees that do not love her/ and the shadow of many fathers"), "Reindeer moss on granite" and "The door".

Other reviews

• Jay Parini (There is a pleasing consistency in these poems, which are always written in a fluent free verse, in robust, clear language. ... A fair number of these poems are confessional. )
• Rebecca Reid (Section 1 of the volume has poems that are a reflection on childhood memories and connections ... Section 2 is a reflection on a literary career. This was by far my favorite section ... Section 3 is a reflection on the tragedies of life. ... Section 4 is the hardest section for me to place. In fact, I didn’t understand some of the poems in it.)
• Elizabeth Bachner (One or two poems are vintage Atwood, like “Heart,” about a heart that gets sold literally, passed around, tasted and dropped, “and you stand listening to all this/ in the corner/ like a newly hired waiter,/ your diffident, skillful hand on the wound hidden/deep in your shirt and chest,/shyly, heartless.” Unfortunately, there are poems in The Door that read like the kind of cluttered, ordinary work a great poet writes to clear out her system)