Reviews
Body memory
POETRY
Margaret Atwood and Ian Williams consider the effects of time and the nature of reality
BY MICHELINE MAYLOR
Dearly
Margaret Atwood
McClelland & Stewart
Word Problems
Ian Williams
Coach House Books
MARGARET ATWOOD CAPTURES the tone of her latest collection in the title poem, when she writes, “Don’t think this is morbid. / It’s just reality.” “Dearly” best encapsulates the poet’s musings on time as an airy nothing: airy, from “done in the air,” and nothing, from “no thing.” Atwood delves into the slipperiness of time as a non-linear and veiled shadow-beast capable of revealing and denying a lifetime of experience through layers of memory, myth, and chiaroscuro.
Following its dedication, “For Graeme, in absentia,” the book opens: “These are the late poems. / Most poems are late / of course: too late, / like a letter sent by a sailor / that arrives after he’s already drowned.” The aftermath of grief is writ on time zones of the heart: that of present grieving, and that of living in the past’s fuller bloom. “Still, sing what you can. / Turn up the light: sing on, / sing: On.”