The Door by Margaret Atwood

Morning In The Burned House is one of my favorite collections of poetry but I took my time getting to Margaret Atwood’s latest because her recent output of fiction (i.e. pretty much everything after Alias Grace) has been not great to terrible. The Door, sadly, doesn’t reach the heights of MitBH but is still a readable collection, with several standouts. The title poem is my runner-up, with Heart being, unsurprisingly, my favorite. There are good meditations on war, aging and the creative process but the dead cat poems are meh and the collection as a whole doesn’t quite have the cohesiveness, much less power, of her earlier work. I’d still rather read this than any of her more recent output by a long shot tho.

Oh, wait, I forgot Hag-Seed was pretty good. So there is hope.