Selected Poems II group discussion

[Alexa]

Atwood's second collection of poetry!

[Alexa]

This contains:
From Two-Headed Poems:
A Paper Bag
The Woman Who Could Not Live With Her Faulty Heart
Five Poems for Dolls
Five Poems for Grandmothers
Marrying the Hangman
Four Small Elegies
Two-Headed Poems
The Bus to Alliston, Ontario
The Woman Makes Peace With Her Faulty Heart
Solstice Poem
Marsh, Hawk
A Red Shirt
Night Poem
All Bread
You Begin
(that's 15 out of the original 29)

From the first part of True Stories:
True Stories
Landcrab I
Landcrab II
Postcard
Nothing
(that's 5 out of 12)

From the second part (titled NOTES TOWARDS A POEM THAT CAN NEVER BE WRITTEN):
A Conversation
Flying Inside Your Own Body
Torture
A Women's Issue
Christmas Carols
Notes Towards a Poem That Can Never Be Written
(that's 6 out of 10)

From the third part:
Vultures
Sunset II
Variation on the Word Sleep
Mushrooms
Out
Blue Dwarfs
Last Day
(that's 7 out of 16)

From Interlunar (Part 1 SNAKE POEMS):
Snake Woman
Bad Mouth
Eating Snake
Metempsychosis
Psalm to Snake
Quattrocento
After Heraclitus
(that's 7 out of 11)

(Part 2 INTERLUNAR):
Bedside
Precognition
Keep
Anchorage
Georgia Beach
A Sunday Drive
Orpheus (1)
Eurydice
The Robber Bridegroom
Letter from Persephone
No Name
Orpheus (2)
The Words Continue Their Journey
Heart Test With an Echo Chamber
A Boat
Interlunar
(that's 16 out of 42)

New Poems:
Aging Female Poet Sits on the Balcony
Porcupine Tree
Aging Female Poet Reads Little Magazines
Porcupine Meditation
Aging Female Poet on Laundry Day
Nightshade on the Way to School
Mothers
She
Werewolf Movies
How to Tell One Country From Another
Machine. Gun. Nest.
The Rest
Another Elegy
Galiano Coast: Four Entrances
Squaw Lilies: Some Notes
Three Praises
Not the Moon

[Alexa]

I think the titles of the new poems look really interesting!

[Alexa]

It's fun revisiting some of these!

[Alexa]

I'm into the section of brand new poems now. A lot of them are about aging, which for a woman in her mid-40s seemed somewhat premature to me - then I wondered if they were thoughts brought on by contemplating menopause. Still, I can't help thinking that the woman she is now would look back on these middle-aged poems about her own aging with a certain amount of humor.

[Alexa]

My review of this:

A collection of poems from Two-Headed Poems, True Stories and Interlunar, with seventeen new poems. Revisiting old friends is always fun! The new ones seem to cover a variety of themes on death, musings about aging and mortality (and I find it amusing that the now-mid-70s Atwood felt compelled to write these in her 40s – I can’t help wondering what her current self would have to say to that self.) There are also a lot of gruesome images here of death and war – which are not pleasant reading!

“Werewolf Movies” was very funny, did it mean to be?
Men who imagine themselves covered with fur and sprouting
fangs, why do they do that?...
...Could then freely growl, and tackle
women carrying groceries...
Dress-ups for boys, some last escape
from having to be lawyers?...

From “How to Tell One Country from Another”:
How many clothes you have to take off
before you can make love.

From “Another Elegy”:
...Even leaves are liquid
arrested. To die
is to dry, lose juice,
the sweet pulp sucked out. To enter
the time of rind and stone.