Morning in the Burned House [Hardcover]

Margaret Atwood (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 25, 1995

Morning in the Burned House sees Margaret Atwood's poetry returning to the fiery intensity of her early books, such as The Circle Game (1966), which won the Canadian Governor General's Award, and Procedures for Underground (1970), which established her as an international voice. These beautifully crafted poems - by turns dark, playful, intensely moving, tender, and intimate - come together as Atwood's most accomplished and versatile gathering to date, "setting foot on the middle ground/between body and word." Some poems draw on history and on myth, both classical and popular. Others, more personal, concern themselves with love and the fragility of the natural world in a contemporary landscape haunted by images of the past. Morning in the Burned House, Atwood's first poetry collection in a decade, shines with breathtaking insight, technical virtuosity, and a clarity of vision that has the force to change the way we look at our lives. As Michael Ondaatje has written, "Margaret Atwood bri

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In her first poetry collection since 1987's Selected Poems II, Atwood brings a swift, powerful energy to meditative poems that often begin in domestic settings and then broaden into numinous dialogues. In "In the Secular Night," the speaker, who has wandered through her house talking to herself of the "sensed absences of God," realizes "Several hundred years ago/this could have been mysticism/ or heresy. It isn't now." In five roughly thematic sections, Atwood often displays incisive humor ("Ava Gardner Reincarnated as a Magnolia"). The most vivid poems forge an apprehensible human aspect from scholarly fields of science, history and religion: in "Half-hanged Mary" a woman who was being hanged for witchery, survives and tolls each hour until she is cut down. The final grouping seems compiled from the charred remains of a deeply examined life, where only "the power of what is not there" may transcend. Atwood's lean, free-verse style renders these apocryphal poems intimate and immediate.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

This is Atwood's first poetry collection in a decade, and its publication (her 12th overall) is a reminder that she is as prolific a poet as she is a novelist. As in her fiction, these poems are written with an arched eyebrow toward the foibles of the sexes, but she is at her most barbed when mocking the constraints society imposes on women. In an acerbic series of poems on famous femmes fatales, she empowers her women by lampooning "men and their mournful romanticisms/that can't get the dishes done." Atwood's satiric side is balanced by a darker, almost melancholy lyricism, shadowed by loss and a growing awareness of mortality. One section of the book is devoted to a group of moving poems on the death of her father and how the dead?"especially those we have loved the most"?return "from where we have shoved them/from under the ground, from under the water/they clutch at us,/we won't let go." Recommended for contemporary poetry collections and libraries with a strong Atwood following.?Christine Stenstrom, Brooklyn P.L., N.Y.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 127 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin; First Edition edition (September 25, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0395755913
• ISBN-13: 978-0395755914
• Product Dimensions: 7.4 x 5.6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,507,668 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

MARGARET ATWOOD, whose work has been published in over thirty-five countries, is the author of more than forty books of fiction, poetry, and critical essays. In addition to The Handmaid's Tale, her novels include Cat's Eye, shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Alias Grace, which won the Giller Prize in Canada and the Premio Mondello in Italy; The Blind Assassin, winner of the 2000 Booker Prize; and her most recent, Oryx and Crake, shortlisted for the 2003 Booker Prize. She lives in Toronto with writer Graeme Gibson.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Profound. Simple. Human., November 3, 1998

By 

Myrtle Poplar (NJ) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Morning in the Burned House (Paperback)

This book is very aptly titled. The poems feel like waking up in a pile of cinders that used to be a house. Not sad really. Just sort of empty. As if everything has been reduced to stark facts with a few flowers sprouting here and there out of the ashes. There is something profoundly touching about these poems. They do an amazing job of conveying the spent feeling after the huge emotional turmoil of losing a parent. One line from the book that runs through my head sometimes: "After a pause, she says--he hears her say--'I love you like salt.'"

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Spare, unsparing poetry, as contemporary as laser., July 9, 1996

By A Customer

This review is from: Morning in the Burned House (Hardcover)

Margaret Atwood is an unnerving poet. The poems from her latest collection, Morning in the Burned House, slip into the dark spaces of the heart and probe the truths hidden there with a surgeon's calm attention and impersonal compassion. Nothing frightens off her surgical pen. And, to stretch the metaphor, there are the same displays of black, laconic humour with which every surgical team challenges death to another round. While many of the poems maintain a cool detachment, more or less amused, Atwood is equally adept at embracing the intensely personal with both love or anger. The most poignant poems in this collection deal with the death of the poet's father - and indeed, as the title of this collection suggests, a sense of loss is at the heart of many of these poems. Atwood's poetic vision of the world is often sharp and bleak. She speaks of this in "Owl Burning" when she writes, "You have soft feet./You don't know what it's like/so close to bedrock'. This is contemporary poetry at its rock hardest - and it's most memorable.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars beautiful, powerful, November 15, 2007

By 

Natalie Miller (Boston, MA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Morning in the Burned House (Paperback)

I've no other way to describe her poetry than powerful. I find her novels to be hit or miss, but this book of poetry is a big hit. The imagery is vivid and visceral. And beautiful. This is one of my favorites and my copy is well worn.