Books: That Consuming Hunger

(2 of 2)

Primeval isolation, a selfhood that is a mystery most of all to oneself, an animal sense of mortality—these are the terrors Miss Atwood has to offer. Technology, social sophistication, are transparent pretenses behind which man is naked, with drooling fang and club at the ready. Dealing in the artifices of well-made verse and well-made novel, she convincingly suggests that the overcivilized and the barbarous are one. Yet the Atwood message is beyond formulated pessimism; it has the rhythmic cycling of hope and despair natural to life itself. A lyricism as honest as a blade of grass in a boulder's crack keeps thrusting through. And so marriage, under the toughest scrutiny by Atwood the novelist, eventually is seen by Atwood the poet as "the edge of the receding glacier" where we crouch— where painfully and with wonder

at having survived even

this far

we are learning to make fire.

Which may be just about as far as the new sensibility can go.