‘Dearly’ is Occasionally Outstanding

“How did we do this just by living / in the normal way,” Margaret Atwood asks in “Dearly,” her first poetry collection in over a decade. This is the question, and the tragedy, at the heart of the book. Catastrophe, loss, and terror — which take many forms, including climate change, death, and rape culture — are all inevitable. They are simultaneously bland and devastating.

Motifs of memory, nature, age, and language run throughout the collection. The poems are written in free verse, with no set rhyming scheme or form. “Dearly,” like Atwood’s 2007 poetry collection, “The Doors,” is divided into five parts. Each section is loosely held together by a theme: Part I, for instance, addresses age and mortality. Of the five sections, IV and V are the standouts: Part IV focuses on nature and mythology while addressing climate change; Part V returns to the themes of endings, mortality, and death that are threaded throughout the entire collection. Atwood’s best poems are filled with surprising imagery and metaphor that allow her to explore the nuances of her subject matter with depth and maturity. But more often than not, Atwood falters at the weightiness of her subject matter. Vague and generic imagery take the reader out of the world Atwood has built. It lacks the emotional poignancy that is indicative of her best work.

Mythology and folk tales are a strong thread throughout the collection. The best of these kinds of poems create a sense of inevitability, using parables to uncover universal and timeless human flaws. “Plasticene Suite,” one of the strongest poems in the entire collection, is a meditation on climate change. In it, Atwood reflects on van Goethe’s parable, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, where a young magician casts a spell that he cannot undo. “Go is easy, / Stop is the hard part,” she writes. It’s repurposed as a story of modern excess: “the magic machine grinds on and on / spewing out mountains of whatnot… / and this will not end well.” There is a continuity to our flaws, Atwood suggests. Though the consequences are immense, the causes are bland.

The strongest poems in the collection make use of similarly haunting images. As Atwood navigates the complex and unassailable territory of aging and death, she returns to unassuming imagery. “You crave the end of mazes,” she writes in “Flatline,” a poem about an aging friend. And in “Invisible Man,” she anticipates the death of a lover, who will become “the shape of an absence,” “a muscle memory, like hanging a hat / on a hook that’s not there any longer.” The gravity of these statements is not conveyed through melodrama, but rather through simplicity. Life is a child’s game; love is a habit — the triviality in these images rings true to the emotions she is trying to capture. Here, the insignificant is sadder than the significant.

But often Atwood’s imagery is vague at critical moments. In “Winter Vacations,” a poem about lost memories, she writes: “but something’s eroded them: / we can’t trace them back.” Change has occurred, but Atwood doesn’t seem to have the language to describe it. This is unusual for her — beyond these lines, the poem is filled with striking images: She describes youth as a “meadow where we began so eagerly / with the berry-filled cups” and aging as a “a trail of muffin crumbs / and wet towels and hotel soaps.” But the strength of these later images only serves to make the former seem more insufficient. In a poem driven by imagery, the omission of one is glaring.

More jarringly, Atwood completely changes the scope of her language. Her best images are detail-oriented and tactile — “muffin crumbs” — not ambitious and conceptual, like erosion. Poems can, of course, use juxtapositions like this to great effect. But here, it feels careless rather than intentional. The emotional crux of the poem is change itself, but the reader is offered no compelling language surrounding it. The poem’s energy is misspent: Though there are nuanced details and motifs to draw the reader in, there is no equally interesting project at the heart of the poem.

This type of misstep is common in the collection. “Souvenirs” meditates, as the title suggests, on souvenirs, which Atwood beautifully describes as “folkloric knitting, droll hardware, / wooden trolls. Shells, hunks of rock. They silt up our luggage.” But near the end of the poem, she simply concludes that souvenirs have “powers, / though I don’t know what they are.” Part of the problem here is stylistic. Atwood abandons one of her most impactful tools — imagery — to make this kind of linguistic turn. But the other part of the problem is inherent in its framing. Ambiguity can be used to pose questions to the reader, to prompt their imagination and their reasoning. Instead, Atwood allows her reader to be comfortable with imprecision. Rather than pushing the boundaries of the ineffable, she returns to easy and nebulous definitions that do not invite further curiosity or interpretation.

Atwood’s strongest poems are outstanding, filled with insight and wisdom that goes far beyond the confines of the page. But too often, the poems fall flat, missing the magic that brings Atwood’s best work to life.