Paper Boat by Margaret Atwood review – the poetry collection of a lifetime

There is transformation, clarity and joy in this selection of work spanning more than six decades

“I want this to be a small book, / a small, slight book, easy to carry, / the sort of book you would tuck in at the last minute / to read on a plane.” I laughed out loud when I read this; only Margaret Atwood would have the deadpannery to place a poem called Small Book on page 520 of such a big one. Paper Boat unfolds across more than six decades, collecting some of her earliest published work – she began as a poet – and sampling all 14 of her collections so far. Two of these are reprinted here complete, Power Politics (1971) and Dearly (2020), both in their ways books about love. The first will never not be near-terrifying and simultaneously strangely freeing in its viscerality, its acid bite. The latter is so moving and expansive about love and loss that out of its wryness, its gravitas and its deep sadness blooms something far beyond the word “moving”.

But then Atwood’s work, her poetry in particular, has always asked words – or maybe us – to press beyond any settled expectations. If I open this book at random, here’s a poem called Reindeer Moss on Granite, where moss on a stone is its own “tiny language”:

Thousands of spores, of rumours
infiltrating the fissures,
moving unnoticed into
the ponderous is of the boulder,
breaking down rock.

fish must be swimming
down in the forest beneath us …
the city, wide and silent,
is lying lost, far undersea.
You saunter beside me, talking
of the beauty of the morning,
not even knowing
that there has been a flood

has you by heart. It knows you backwards,
you and your sulky anguish, because you’re in it
now, you’re in this book,
it’s reading you, you’re caught by it, you can’t get out.

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