A stunning lyrical achievement and Atwood’s first collection of new poems in over a decade.

The Door is Margaret Atwood’s first book of poetry since the award-winning Morning in the Burned House (1995). Its fifty lucid yet urgent poems range in tone from lyric to ironic to meditative 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. The collection begins with poems that consider the past and ends with harbingers of things to come.

Brave and compassionate, The Door interrogates the certainties that we build our lives on.

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FINALIST 2007 - Governor General's Literary Award - Poetry

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“Atwood’s poems are short, glistening with terse, bright images, untentative, closing like a vise. . . . A plain, explicit poetry, perfectly sure of itself.”
— New York Times

“Margaret Atwood is best known, of course, as a novelist. But she brings to her poetry the same sharp eye and stinging wit.”
— Robert Haas, Washington Post

“Atwood is always vital, powerful, magnetically readable. . . . Readers who know only her novels really owe it to themselves to read her poems.”
— Booklist

“Margaret Atwood’s The Door is one of the best books by one of the best poets writing in English, written in a sparse, elegiac tone that combines illuminating intelligence with caustic humour, and wisdom that for once truly comes with age.”
- Alberto Manguel, Times Literary Supplement Books of the Year

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Visit Margaret Atwood's Website

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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
 
Acknowledgements

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Margaret Atwood is the celebrated author of more than forty books of fiction, poetry, and literary criticism. Her more recent works of fiction are the Booker Prize—winner The Blind Assassin, Oryx and Crake, The Tent, and Moral Disorder. She lives in Toronto.

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