The Door

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The Door (eBook) Pub. Date: 4/2/2009 Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
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The Door (Reprint) Pub. Date: 4/1/2009 Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
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The Door (Includes CD of Poems) Pub. Date: 11/7/2007 Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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The Door Pub. Date: 9/11/2007 Publisher: McClelland & Stewart Ltd.

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Overview

The Door, Margaret Atwood's first book of poetry since Morning in the Burned House, is a magnificent achievement. Here in paperback for the first time, these fifty lucid, urgent poems range in tone from lyric to ironic to mediative to prophetic, and in subject from the personal to the political, viewed in its broadest sense. They investigate the mysterious writing of poetry itself, as well as the passage of time and our shared sense of mortality. Brave and compassionate, The Door interrogates the certainties that we build our lives on, and reminds us once again of Margaret Atwood's unique accomplishments as one of the finest and most celebrated writers of our time.

Editorial Reviews

Library Journal

If there's an overriding theme to Atwood's latest volume of poems, her first since Morning in the Burned House(1995), it's the messiness of love. As the widely lauded author presents it in these 50 poems, love is shape-shifting; its moments of tenderness, toughness, insights, and insults appear and disappear like the Cheshire cat. Atwood looks at cats, crickets, butterflies, woods, gardens, autumn, a dying mother, the difficulties of aging-specifically of being an aging female poet-and the nature of poetry from the inside out. In "Owl and Pussycat, Some Years Later," a blend of dramatic monolog and parody, for example, she makes those nursery-rhyme figures not just people, but poets. As the titular characters muse regretfully on their shared past, they wonder whether their talent is any better "than the ability to win the sausage-eating contest, or juggle six plates at once." Their tone suggests the dichotomy of whimsy and dark irony that suffuses the book, one complementing the other. A richly layered collection; highly recommended for all libraries.
—Diane Scharper

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780547237701
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Publication date: 4/1/2009
Edition description: Reprint
Pages: 130
Sales rank: 571,101
Product dimensions: 0.31 (w) x 6.00 (h) x 9.00 (d)

Meet the Author

Margaret Atwood

MARGARET ATWOOD'S poetry, like her fiction - including The Handmaid's Tale and the Booker-winning The Blind Assassin—is known and acclaimed around the world. Her last collection, Morning in the Burned House, won the Trillium Book Award in 1995. The author of more than forty works of fiction, poetry, critical essays, and books for children, Atwood has received top honors and awards in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom, and many other countries. She lives in Toronto. In 2008, Atwood was awarded the prestigious Prince of Asturias Award Laureate for Letters, considered to be the Spanish-language Nobel.

Biography

When Margaret Atwood announced to her friends that she wanted to be a writer, she was only 16 years old. It was Canada. It was the 1950s. No one knew what to think. Nonetheless, Atwood began her writing career as a poet. Published In 1964 while she was still a student at Harvard, her second poetry anthology, The Circle Game, was awarded the Governor General's Award, one of Canada's most esteemed literary prizes. Since then, Atwood has gone on to publish many more volumes of poetry (as well as literary criticism, essays, and short stories), but it is her novels for which she is best known.

Atwood's first foray into fiction was 1966's The Edible Woman, an arresting story about a woman who stops eating because she feels her life is consuming her. Grabbing the attention of critics, who applauded its startlingly original premise, the novel explored feminist themes Atwood has revisited time and time again during her long, prolific literary career. She is famous for strong, compelling female protagonists -- from the breast cancer survivor in Bodily Harm to the rueful artist in Cat's Eye to the fatefully intertwined sisters in her Booker Prize-winning novel The Blind Asassin.

Perhaps Atwood's most legendary character is Offred, the tragic "breeder" in what is arguably her most famous book, 1985's The Handmaid's Tale. Part fable, part science fiction, and part dystopian nightmare, this novel presented a harrowing vision of women's lives in an oppressive futuristic society. The Washington Post compared it (favorably) to George Orwell's iconic 1984.

As if her status as a multi-award-winning, triple-threat writer (fiction, poetry, and essays) were not enough, Atwood has also produced several children's books, including Princess Prunella and the Purple Peanut (1995) and Rude Ramsay and the Roaring Radishes (2003) -- delicious alliterative delights that introduce a wealth of new vocabulary to young readers.

1. Hometown:
  
  Toronto, Ontario
1. Date of Birth:
  
  November 18, 1939
2. Place of Birth:
  
  Ottawa, Ontario
1. Education:
  
  B.A., University of Toronto, 1961; M.A. Radcliffe, 1962; Ph.D., Harvard University, 1967
2. Website:
  
  http://www.owtoad.com

Read an Excerpt

GASOLINEShivering in the almost-drizzleinside the wooden outboard,nose over gunwale,I watched it drip and spreadon the sheenless water:the brightest thing in wartime,a slick of rainbow,ephemeral as insect wings,green, blue, red, and pink,my shimmering private sideshow.Was this my best toy, then?This toxic smudge, this overspillfrom a sloppy gascan filledwith essence of danger?I knew that it was poison,its beauty an illusion:I could spell flammable.But still, I loved the smell:so alien, a whiffof starstuff.I would have liked to drink it,inhale its iridescence.As if I could.That's how gods lived: as if. EUROPE ON $5 A DAYSunrise. The thin pocked sheetsare being washed. The city's old,but new to me, and thereforestrange, and therefore fresh.Everything's clear, but flat –even the oculist's dingy eyes,even the butcher's, with its painted horse,its trays of watery entrailsand slabs of darkening flesh.I walk along,looking at everything equally.I've got all I own in this bag.I've cut myself off.I can feel the placewhere I used to be attached.It's raw, as when you grateyour finger. It's a shredded messof images. It hurts.But where exactly on meis this torn-off stem?Now here, now there.Meanwhile the other girl,the one with the memory,is coming nearer and nearer.She's catching up to me,trailing behind her, like red smoke,the rope we share.

I Gasoline Europe on $5 a day Year of the Hen Resurrecting the dolls' house Blackie in Antarctica Mourning for cats January Butterfly My mother dwindles . . .
Crickets

II The poet has come back . . .
Heart Your children cut their hands . . .
Sor Juana works in the garden Owl and Pussycat, some years later The poets hang on Poetry reading A poor woman learns to write The singer of owls

III Ten o'clock news The weather It's autumn Bear lament Ice palace Secrecy The last rational man White cotton T- shirt War photo War photo 2
Nobody cares who wins The Valley of the Heretics Saint Joan of Arc on a postcard The hurt child They give evidence

IV Enough of these discouragements Possible activities Questioning the dead The nature of Gothic The line: five variations Another visit to the Oracle

V Boat song Dutiful String tail Stealing the Hummingbird Cup One day you will reach . . .
Disturbed earth Reindeer moss on granite The Third Age visits the Arctic You heard the man you love At Brute Point The door

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