Morning in the Burned House

by Margaret Atwood

Overview

These beautifully crafted poems - by turns dark, playful, intensely moving, tender, and intimate - make up Margaret Atwood's most accomplished and versatile gathering to date, " setting foot on the middle ground / between body and word." Some draw on history, some on myth, both classical and popular. Others, more personal, concern themselves with love, with the fragility of the natural world, and with death, especially in the elegiac series of meditations on the death of a parent. But they also inhabit a contemporary landscape haunted by images of the past. Generous, searing, compassionate, and disturbing, this poetry rises out of human experience to seek a level between luminous memory and the realities of the everyday, between the capacity to inflict and the strength to forgive.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780395825211
Publisher:	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Publication date:	09/28/1996
Series:	Edition 001 Series
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	144
Sales rank:	110,911
Product dimensions:	5.37(w) x 7.25(h) x 0.37(d)

About the Author

Margaret Atwood is the author of more than forty volumes of poetry, children’s literature, fiction, and non-fiction, but is best known for her novels, which include The Edible Woman (1969), The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), The Robber Bride (1994), Alias Grace (1996), and The Blind Assassin, which won the prestigious Booker Prize in 2000. A book of short stories called Stone Mattress: Nine Tales was published in 2014. Her novel, MaddAddam (2013), is the final volume in a three-book series that began with the Man-Booker prize-nominated Oryx and Crake (2003) and continued with The Year of the Flood (2009). The Tent (mini-fictions) and Moral Disorder (short fiction) both appeared in 2006. A volume of poetry, The Door, was published in 2007. In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination, a collection of non-fiction essays appeared in 2011. Her non-fiction book, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth was adapted for the screen in 2012. Ms. Atwood’s work has been published in more than forty languages, including Farsi, Japanese, Turkish, Finnish, Korean, Icelandic and Estonian.
Margaret Atwood lives in Toronto with writer Graeme Gibson.
www.margaretatwood.ca

Hometown:

Toronto, Ontario

Date of Birth:

November 18, 1939

Place of Birth:

Ottawa, Ontario

Education:

B.A., University of Toronto, 1961; M.A. Radcliffe, 1962; Ph.D., Harvard University, 1967

Website:

http://www.owtoad.com

Read an Excerpt

THE MOMENT

The moment when, after many years of hard work and a long voyage you stand in the centre of your room,
house, half-acre, square mile, island, country,
knowing at last how you got there,
and say, I own this,

is the same moment the trees unloose their soft arms from around you,
the birds take back their language,
the cliffs fissure and collapse,
the air moves back from you like a wave and you can’t breathe.
S
No, they whisper. You own nothing.
You were a visitor, time after time climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming.
We never belonged to you.
You never found us.
It was always the other way round.

Editorial Reviews

Margaret Atwood brings all the violence of mythology into the present world…. She is the quiet Mata Hari, the mysterious, violent figure...who pits herself against the ordered, too-clean world like an arsonist.” Michael Ondaatje,The Canadian Forum

“Atwood’s poems are short, glistening with terse, bright images, untentative, closing like a vise.… A plain, explicit poetry, perfectly sure of itself.” The New York Times

From the Publisher