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IT IS A decade since Margaret Atwood published her last book of verse, and we have become used to seeing her as the author of internationally celebrated novels rather than as the writer of the kind of disturbing poems -- lyrically almost perfect, yet meant to startle with their bleakness -- that she offered in early books like Power Politics (1971) and The Circle Game (1978).
This early Atwood had many of the characteristics of what one might call group poetry, the poetry of the young who cluster round the little publishing houses and little magazines dedicated to publishing the writing of the barely known. But the list of journals in which the poems of this new collection, Morning in the Burned House, have been first published is markedly different from those of her past books. These poems appeared in the pages of magazines like The Atlantic Monthly, Field, Harper's, and The Times Literary Supplement, magazines that publish an author because of her fame and acceptance. They would seem to be conferring rank in the international as well as the Canadian literary establishment.
HOUSE OF MEMORY
Yet these are not poems of the establishment, although as a collection they are...