National Network for Equitable Library Service

These beautifully crafted poems—by turns dark, playful, intensely moving, tender and intimate—come together as Atwood's most accomplished and versatile gathering of poems to date, "setting foot on the middle ground/between body and word." Some draw on history, and on myth, both classical and popular. Other, more personal poems concern themselves with love, with the fragility of the natural world, and with death—especially in the elegiac series of meditations on the death of a parent—as they inhabit a contemporary landscape haunted by images of the past. Generous, compassionate, disturbing, this is poetry that emanates from the heart of human experience and seeks balance between the luminous realm of memory and the realities of everyday, between darkness and light, the capacity to perpetrate and the strength to forgive. Morning in the Burned House is infused with breathtaking insight, technical virtuosity, and a clarity of vision that has the force to change the way we look at our lives.