​“This landscape became my hometown,” writes Atwood in Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing. Her mother, a dietician, would educate the children (Atwood’s brother, Harold, is three years older; her sister Ruth, was born in 1951) with work books borrowed from school. In a 2017 interview with The New Yorker, Atwood remembers, “The faster you could do them, the sooner you could go out and play, so I became very rapid and superficial in my execution of those sorts of things.” Exploration was encouraged. Atwood’s father would lead his children through the woods, examining insects and plants; one can imagine how this education sharpened Atwood’s

poetic eye.  

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It was at the Bohemian Embassy coffeehouse, in an old building off Toronto’s Yonge Street, in 1960 that Atwood gave her first public reading. The room was typically dark and smoke-filled, the only light coming as an intrusive blast each time someone opened the bathroom door. Poets’ voices struggled to match the espresso machine, rumoured to be the first in Toronto. Atwood once likened it to baptism by fire—the only place in the city where poets could read to an audience (Gwendolyn MacEwen also cut her teeth at the Embassy). “Once you'd done that, you were kind of ready for everything.” 

 

Double Persephone, Atwood’s first collection, was handset on a flatbed press in 1961, the cover printed by linoblock, selling for fifty cents; under two hundred copies were made: these are the poems which will greet readers in the first pages of Paper Boat.

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The Circle Game arrived in 1966, winning the Governor General’s Award, Canada’s only big literary prize of the time—an unexpected, albeit thrilling success for the young poet. After that: Atwood’s first novel, The Edible Woman. In the 1970s works of poetry, fiction and critical essays were published in quick succession: The Journals of Susanna Moodie, Procedures for Underground, Power Politics, You Are Happy, and Surfacing, as well as Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. As the years progressed Atwood’s canon (and literary star status) grew: Life Before Man, Cat’s Eye, Alias Grace, The Testaments. She has authored children’s books and graphic novels, is known worldwide for her best-selling and critically acclaimed novel The Handmaid’s Tale, which has been translated into over forty languages and was adapted into a popular television series. For one of the most prolific and revered literary figures of our time, fiction is often born from the poetic: “Most of [my novels] have begun with seeds planted first in poems,” she tells me.

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As a teenager, Margaret Atwood was my introduction to poetry. In English class when we read The Handmaid’s Tale, I was struck by its poetic licence: Nothing moves in the searchlight moon. The scent from the garden rises like heat from a body, there must be night-blooming flowers, it’s so strong. I can almost see it, red radiation, waving upwards like the shimmer above highway tarmac at noon. The English literature teacher introduced me to Mad Shadows by Marie-Claire Blais; the thread between these two authors encouraged me to delve deeper into Canadian literature. In the library’s poetry section, I found Miriam Waddington, Susan Musgrave—and more Margaret Atwood. The poems, underlined, memorized, and in some cases never returned to the library, nurtured my own creativity. 

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Growing up on a farm in the days of low-speed, dial-up internet, in a rural area of Southern Ontario where the bus ride to school was close to an hour each way, I had plenty of time to read. Life then was measured in distances: from our house to town, our house to school. I knew every bump in the two-lane highway and backroads. In summer, lush fields thrummed like green oceans. The landscape, dotted with old farmhouses like the one I grew up in, felt as though it belonged to another era. I also measured life by seasons: During the springtime, sheep moved in amoebic waltzes across the rolling hills. During winter, the wind snaked across hardened mounds of earth where crop once grew, ghosts travelling in silent procession. It was through Atwood’s poetry that I developed a language for what I saw and felt there. 

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At eighteen, when I graduated high school and moved to Toronto, my personal library multiplied like an invasive species. I visited any and every used bookstore, collecting whichever volumes were on offer: You Are Happy, Two-Headed Poems, her Selected Poems 1966-1984 and Selected Poems II 1976 - 1986. These collections were at once urgent and evocative, alive with the poet’s spellbinding ability to observe, imagine, record, transfuse. 

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Over the course of working on this interview, I’ve asked myself why Atwood’s poems resonate with me so deeply. It extends beyond merely reading her in high school: I lived not far from the farm where she and her husband, the writer Graeme Gibson, produced novels like Alias Grace and Perpetual Motion. I think of a poem like “The Surveyors”, which describes the diffused weight of summer. The full moon, oval and gentle, the sun, the snow, the cedar groves, the ragweed, the frogs with their dud guitar-string throats... The roads she writes about are ones I’ve travelled hundreds of times; I could relate to the images in her poems because I had encountered them there myself—her seasons were my seasons. Her language was not merely an escape, but an incision—a surgery—into (and of) the everyday. Deconstruction, she writes, shines with such beauty.

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There is no easy way to summarize Atwood’s poetic canon. Diverse as they are in both theme and form, the poems share a single commonality: they move the reader. A teenage girl in the rural countryside may be reading poems from The Journals of Susanna Moodie—a groundbreaking collection written from the perspective of an English settler whose life in the backwoods of Ontario during the 1830s inspired the famous Canadian memoir, Roughing it in the Bush—but lines like I am a word / in a foreign language or the air / was about to tell me / all kinds of answers are universal. 

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It’s not as though a poet can remove their uniform or clock out at the end of the day—they possess a constant awareness of the world around them. From “Four Small Elegies”: A language is not words only, / it is the stories / that are told in it, / the stories that are never told. To read the poems in Paper Boat, then, is to delve into a life of keen observation. Through these pages, Atwood navigates the complexities of love, history, identity, and death with an exactitude that only she can conjure. Marge Piercy once described Atwood’s poems as having the power to “explain to you why and how you are dying and help keep you alive.” Paper Boat is a portal: Enter if you dare, there is no telling where you’ll end up. 

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Though the collection spans from the beginning of her career with Double Persephone, to her latest work—including the title poem—from 2023, this is not the definitive  collection of Atwood’s life as a poet. As she will tell in this interview, “There’s much moooore….” In a message to the reader in Paper Boat’s acknowledgements, Atwood imparts: “Writing passes from hand to hand, and if you are reading this, my writing is now in your hands. To paraphrase a great aphorist, the spirit blows wherever it wishes. I hope you don’t find it an ill wind.”

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Whether you are an ardent reader of all things Atwood, or are new to her oeuvre, you will find that Paper Boat is a remarkable volume by a poet who has seemingly always been at the height of her powers. These poems will entrance you. Stop you in your tracks. Encourage you, as Atwood’s father did, to look closer: the true story is vicious. Perhaps you will write a poem of your own. Perhaps you will not. One thing, through the histories and romances, the decay and the light of these poems, remains certain: wherever Margaret Atwood leads, we will follow. ​​​