THE DOOR

Margaret Atwood

Houghton Mifflin Company

215 Park Avenue South

New York, NY 10003

Paper, 128 pages, $25

ISBN-10: 0-618-94272-6

ISBN-13: 978-0618-94272-5

The wit of Margaret Atwood sticks like a stiletto in the ribs of your imagination. In The Door, her first collection of poetry in more than a decade, she opens a door to a dark, often harshly real vision of the world. As she says in Enough of These Discouragements, where she takes the symbol of an angel and turns its meaning upside down:

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.

And in a long suite entitled Another Visit to the Oracle, she says:

I lack the airiness,

I lack the feathers.

That s not what I do.

What I do: I see

in darkness. I see

darkness. I see you.

In Boat Song, she compares the false comfort of contemporary society to those who played in the band on the deck of the Titanic as it went down. In The Last Rational Man, she tricks up the tyrant Caligula, with all his imperial arrogance, and pits him against the last senator of Rome with any sense of logic, no matter how cowed he is by Caligula s absolute power. There s more than one way to read most poems, but when Atwood describes Caligula as a man whose eyes hold the malicious glitter / of a madman who s telling a lie, / and knows it, and dares contradiction, it s difficult not to imagine Cheney and other members of the Bush Administration, and the lies they have told us. As Atwood says in White Cotton Shirt:

Ignorance makes all things clean.

Our knowledge weighs us down.

Atwood s cynicism comes full circle when she does what many writers finally do writing about writers and poets, writing about writing and poetry. In The Poets Hang On, she describes poets as those who stand by the road, holding out their begging bowls:

They can t sing, they can t fly.

They only hop and croak

and bash themselves against the air

as if in cages,

and tell the old tired jokes.

Atwood strikes a similar chord in Owl And Pussycat, Some Years Later, where she laments what little she and another writer have accomplished, although she lampoons their egos with the fact they can now say flattering things about each other / on dust jackets. Whatever momentary notice the world might give in the newspaper leads only to your face used later for fishwrap What it all comes down to, Atwood says, is we were born with mortality s / hook in us.

No longer semi-immortal, but moulting owl

and arthritic pussycat, we row

out past the last protecting

sandbar, towards the salty

open sea, the dogs -head gate,

and after that, oblivion.

But sing on, sing

on, someone may still be listening

besides me. The fish for instance.

Anyway, my dearest one,

we still have the moon.

The hard truth of these poems is not some distant beacon but more like the heat off a bare stretch of rock at noon on which only resignation and cynical despair might grow. This is the work of a poet who has, at least in this volume, abandoned herself to the realm of mortality and, in large part, futility. In Dutiful, she lays bare these emotions and asks herself, as do many with the need to create art as the essence of the soul, why she feels responsible for the soft, unbearable sadness / filtering down from the stars? She leaves this question unanswered, but later tells us that One day you will reach a bend in your life where Time will curve like a wind. ( One Day You Will Reach )

Atwood is, as she says, a poet who does our confessions for us. ( Poetry Reading ) Sadly, we have much too many confessions to make, although, in War Photo 2, she does allow a glimmer of hope, though not without a sense of hopelessness:

When will there be compassion?

When the dead tree flowers.

When will the dead tree flower?

When you take my hand.