“It always Takes a Long Time/to Decipher Where You Are”: Uncanny Spaces and Troubled Times in Margaret Atwood’s Poetry

Eleonora Rao

doi:10.3390/h6030063

Abstract

The focus is on Atwood’s most recent poetry collections; Morning in the Burned House (1995) and The Door (2007), in addition to the prose poems volume The Tent (2006). They have in common, albeit with a different emphasis, a preoccupation with mortality and with the writing of poetry itself. They also share a special concern for space. This reading considers space and landscape to function as metonyms. Space here is far from being passive; instead it is constantly in the process of being constructed. The disorientation that the poetic personae experience in these texts follows a labyrinthine pattern where heterogeneity and multiplicity in the sense of contemporaneous plurality prevail. In this perspective, the identity of a place becomes open and provisional, including that of a place called home.

Highlights

Seeking an Untenable SecurityIn addition to anxieties around place, the insecurities confronted by the protagonists of Atwood’s poetry are heightened by the sense of living in what Zygmunt Bauman has termed “liquid times”, or “liquid modernity”
The Door (2007), in addition to the prose poems volume The Tent (2006)
Examining recurring and related anxieties around home, place, time, and modernity, this essay is concerned with the manner in which ideas of mortality and creativity are linked with representations of space and place in Atwood’s poetry

Summary

Seeking an Untenable Security

In addition to anxieties around place, the insecurities confronted by the protagonists of Atwood’s poetry are heightened by the sense of living in what Zygmunt Bauman has termed “liquid times”, or “liquid modernity”. The poems in The Door are immersed in the liquid atmosphere of contemporary times, and show the uneasiness, the insecurities, the precariousness, and the obsession with safety that are common; they stress the anxieties of the subject, and the strategies employed to navigate the conditions they have to face. In these texts, the poet plays a major role in trying to show the way to overcome fear. A number of these poems inscribe the poet’s concern to comfort and reassure the reading public

Meta-Poetry or a Personal Poetics

Dutiful and Disobedient Women

Thresholds