Natural Imagery in Margaret Atwood’s Recent Poetry

Abstract

Margaret Atwood’s concern for nature, the earth and its species as well as for environmental topics has always populated her fiction and poetry. My aim in the present essay is to explore how Atwood represents nature in a selection of poems from her more recent poetry volumes (Morning in the Burned House, 1995; The Door, 2007; Dearly, 2020). Some poems in these collections attest to her concern for the environment, its degradation and poisoning. Others represent apocalyptic environmental relationships as well as themes of natural renewal as an effort to deal with human mortality and vulnerability. We also find poems where nature is presented as a commodity, as a repository of necessary knowledge or as a mythical resting place. Metamorphosis and change play essential roles both in human life and in the natural world, and figure prominently in the selected poems.