Now back to the task at hand.

It's kind of hard not to enjoy The Door, at least on a very basic level. Who doesn't like animal poems? And there's nothing difficult about any of it. I'm not sure if she's speaking for herself in "Another Visit to the Oracle," but I don't think Atwood's poetry is getting any more condensed, compressed, cryptic or aphoristic. In fact, what the Oracle says is undercut by the way she says it:

Soon I'll get everything down to one word.
All crammed in there, very
condensed you understand, like an
extremely small black star. Like a black
hole. Like a dense potential. Like the letter A.
You see what I mean about cryptic.
I could go on like this for hours. Weeks month
years centuries millennia.

The language here is not condensed. The Oracle is just going on and on. "I've had to edit," she says, but there's not much evidence of that. Nor is there any sense of being cryptic. These poems all wear their heart on their sleeve, and make their point with simple diction and little in the way of formal complexity. I didn't think much was happening rhythmically. And so there are few memorable lines or passages. It's all very accessible, but what I found discouraging was the plainness of much of what was being expressed. The poem "Butterfly," an elegy for her father, for example, struck me as surprisingly trite, ending with the lame line about the "brown meandering river" of his childhood that "he was always in some way after that / trying in vain to get back to."  This is such a conventional thought, and it isn't helped by the packaging: the stale language (rivers are always meandering), the weak qualification ("in some way"), and the final breath of cliché ("trying in vain").  

No, it's not Hallmark, but it is leaning in that direction. Another poem I found particularly frustrating in this regard was "The Poets Hang On." Most of the poem consists of the speaker expressing her disbelief that poets continue to "hang on" despite the fact that nowadays everyone just wants them to go away. Some simple imagery is used to illustrate the usual attacks on poets for being too pretentious, not being idealistic or uplifting, and not speaking plainly enough. Of course we're expecting a payoff twist at the end, but all we get is the following:

They know something, though.
They do know something.
Something they're whispering,
something we can't quite hear.
Is it about sex?
Is it about dust?
Is it about fear?

I really hated this. Why is the speaker so sure that the poets know "something," whatever that something may be? And the rhetorical questioning, which is an annoying habit Atwood falls back on quite a bit in this book, seems to only round the whole thing off in a shrug (the end of the poem "Boat Song" is almost the same in terms of the sentiment and its vague expression). 

I didn't find all of the book as objectionable as these observations suggest. I got into the spirit of some of the poems. "Year of the Hen" I thought worked very well, even incorporating some effective rhymes. And it was nice to see the owl and the pussycat again. But there was little here that seemed particularly compelling, accomplished, or in any way exceptional. Atwood's sense of the line seemed to wander a bit - though, as I'm afraid we will see in some of the other books on our list, she is not alone in this. In any event, she seems to me to be someone who lives or dies by the image. Lives . . . or dies:

White clouds, downy as pillows,
grey ones like giant thumbs,
dark ones, fat with doom.

It's hard for any poet to get away with stuff like that. 

I don't think I'm an Atwood hater. And this is not a bad book, at least in my opinion. But I didn't think it had enough spring in its step, or anything particularly new to say

Carmine: Atwood's new book is polarizing opinion not because of her fame, but because that fame is single-handedly keeping a very dull book in sight. There’s no other reason, to my mind, why something so weak would be admitted to the GG shortlist except that the jury (which includes one of our most fanged anti-lyric agitators!) simply didn’t have the grit to keep it out. Deference is also a major reason reviewers have been so unreliable. Their excessive praise for The Door is another example of how reviews, in this country, act like offshore banks: they wash bad money clean.

Loss of energy in aging, famous poets is something no one likes to talk about. Something similar happened with Purdy's last books (like To Paris Never Again) and all it did was cause fans to redouble their efforts to find any evidence to prove that he could still do the job. Unfortunately creativity, unlike a literary career, is not a renewable resource. There will be fallow periods, and The Door proves it.

Thin, paltry, tepidly chatty - this is not the Atwood I remember. And which Atwood would that be? One who, at the top of her game (1971 to 1985, roughly), could kneecap any propriety. Atwood used to have a mean streak, but now just means well. I hate the self-congratulation that attends this book, its narcissistic theme of poet as hero, the glib way her sympathy for life’s hardships (which she calls "the pain theatricals") is feelingfully injected into the writing (a sentimentality sets its sights very high when it comes to the death of her cats: "Why such deep mourning? / Is t because we can no longer / see in the dark without them?"). Not to mention the flippant rhetorical questions that clog so many of these poems ("How did I get so dutiful? Was I always that way?" or "Why did you feel so hurt then, and so curious, / and also happy, / and also set free?"). Atwood also sums up the current eco-worries thusly: "Is it our fault? / Did we cause this wreckage by breathing? / All we wanted was a happy life, / and for things to go on as they used to." WTF? All compression and heat seems to have gone out of her language.  There are a few decent pieces (like "Reindeer Moss on Granite"), and an interesting image or two jolts her flat-lining utterances ("torn plastic / bags like ectoplasmic birds flitter and stream"). But none of this is enough to stave off disappointment at a poet who was once capable of fresher ideas, fiercer stances.

You seem to want to give Atwood the benefit of the doubt. And to be honest, so did I. Atwood-bashing bores me. She is demonized far too much, and given too little credit. But even-handedness seems exactly the wrong response here. Atwood is one of our most cosseted and celebrated figures, but she is also a writer who has carefully cultivated the image of someone who suffers no fools. So why should I be expected to play one? This tedious book has absolutely no business being on the shortlist. And it's infuriating to watch such a lazy effort, simply because of  the legendary career it's attached to, help itself to a heap of attention. But then, what else did I expect? I remember during the 2005 Griffin readings when Atwood, as a trustee, was charged with handing out special leather-bound copies of the nominated titles on stage. At her turn, Roo Borson curtsied and kissed Atwood's hand. Atwood didn't flinch, but I did. Borson’s worshipfulness struck me as the perfect image for a cultural marketplace dedicated to "re-endorsing the pre-endorsed," (as the British poet Peter Riley put it). Fervently wishing it otherwise won’t change things.

One thing’s for sure, Atwood's flop offers a useful lesson: fame can protect you from bad news but it can't protect you from writing bad poems.

Alex: I think I was definitely more "whatever" than "WTF" with this book. It's interesting that we both hated all the rhetorical questions. As an aspect of anyone's style I think they're usually a crutch. I know I have to fight against using them in my own writing because they can become a lazy habit. Finding so many of them in a book of poetry was troubling, and contributed a lot to the "whatever" factor for me.

Paul: I have to admit at the outset that Margaret Atwood has never really written the kind of poems that I would consider to be to my taste, and The Door strikes me much the same way a lot of her earlier poetry has struck me, that is, it doesn't strike me much at all. I can tell that an expert hand has crafted much of the work in it, but it feels clinical and distant to me. I guess it all comes down to cups of tea, and this just isn't mine. I usually find a certain amount of visceral or emotional intimacy, or even good-natured playfulness, in the poetry I like best, but I can't find that kind of blood-n-guts, or even that kind of joie de vivre, in The Door.

Sure, there are poems in this book that succeed enough to be enjoyed on a basic level, perhaps because they have striking imagery or clever turns of phrase, but there isn't much here to make me sit up and feel excited. And just because a book has a handful of fundamentally unobjectionable poems in it, does that mean it should qualify it for a national literary award? Only if you're famous enough, I suppose. I would agree (and begrudgingly at that, since it is already a tired cliché to credit Atwood's success to her fame, but wasn't there a time when the reverse was true?) that, yes, Atwood's fame, and perhaps an obligatory sense of it being "her turn" for another nomination, are the main reasons this book on this list.

I'm coming in late to this part of the discussion, and I don't feel that I have much to add to the discussion that hasn't already been said. I don't think I actively disliked the book as much as Carmine, so I suppose I agree mainly with Alex. It isn't bad, but it really doesn't move me enough for me to recommend it, not that her readership is hanging on my recommendation. That said, I would like to take this opportunity to recommend Oryx and Crake - it has blood and guts, and joie de vivre, in spades - lest anyone want to accuse me of any knee-jerk anti-Atwoodism.

Alex: Paul, I just want to thank you for continuing the great tradition of our jurors, including Zach Wells and Shane Neilson, calling for MORE BLOOD in our poetry! 

NEXT: Avenging All Our Wonders