Review: The Door

Margaret Atwood is my favorite. I've written about her before and one of the things I must do before I die is meet her. Well, at least see her in person. Heck, I'd even settle for the LongPen (she's such a genius- is there anything she doesn't do?).

I'm not a huge poetry reader. I find that most poetry is too muddled and pretentious or possibly I am just too thick and lazy to appreciate it. I love Atwood's poetry though. The Door strikes me as being one of her most personal poetry collections. It's also quite political, however, that isn't surprising since Atwood tends to be fairly political. Here's one of my favorite poems:

Nobody Cares Who Wins

Nobody cares who wins wars.
They care at the moment:
they like the parades, the cheering;
but after that, winning diminishes.
A silver cup on the mantle
engraved with some year or other;
a hoard of buttons cut from corpses
as souvenirs; a shameful thing
you did in white-hot anger shoved
back out of sight.
Bad dreams, a bit of loot.
There's not much to say about it.

That was a fine time, you think.
I've never felt more alive.
Nonetheless, victory puzzles you.
Some days you forget where you've put it,
though younger men make speeches about it
as if they had been there too.

Of course it's better to win
than not. Who wouldn't prefer it?

Losing, though. That's different.
Defeat grows like a mutant vegetable,
swelling with the unsaid.
It's always with you, spreading underground,
feeding on what's gone missing:
your son, your sister, your father's house,
the life you should have had.
It's never in the past, defeat.
It soaks into the present,
it stains even the morning sun
the colour of burnt earth.

At last it breaks the surface.
It bursts. It bursts into song.
Long songs, you understand.
They go on and on.

If you've never checked out her poetry before I suggest you do it!