Margaret Atwood's Poetry: A "High Voltage Wire"

• 'The wills'. "Writing is an act of hope"

There is a book that explains Margaret Atwood, the writer she would become.

And it is not 'The Handmaid's Tale', but a rare practically unfindable cult object:

Double Persephone

, the debut feature that he self-published in 1961, when he was 19 years old.

She pasted the pages herself.

He was still studying at university and together with two colleagues he edited a short volume of seven poems: 220 copies that sold for 50 cents.

Today, these

can fetch more than 2,500 euros, as is the case with The Scribe Bookstore in Toronto.

In

, Atwood talked about gardens and nature, love and Persephone.

Some themes that will appear again and again in all his work, whether poetic or prose.

From

(1985) to 'Oryx and Crake' (2003), nature often takes the form of dystopia in her novels.

And if in 1961 he was already writing from another perspective about Persephone, queen of the underworld, he will also do so with Penelope -who is not only waiting for Ulysses- in

Penelope and the twelve maids

(2005).

Atwood also

Although her success as a writer has overshadowed her lyrical side, Margaret Atwood is, above all, a poet.

"I have a theory that cannot be verified ... A novelist and a poet use different areas of the brain: the novelist uses the most common part, that of social discourse, while the poet activates

" he said. Atwood from his apartment in Canada at the opening of the Barcelona Poetry Festival, last October.

Before publishing his first novel,

(1969) Atwood had already written eight collections of poems.

And this November,

(Penguin)

launches

issue 17 (not counting its three anthologies)

on the Anglo-Saxon market

.

"And this is poetry: a high voltage cable. / It is as if you put a fork / in a socket. So do not think that it is only about flowers", Atwood writes in

, one of the poems in which he reflects on poetry and the meaning of being a poet.

His poetic silence goes back to that

', collected in

(2007), one of his few poems translated in Spain and published by Bruguera, the publisher of Ana Maria Moix.

"He's still a better poet" than a novelist, Moix used to repeat when Atwood received the

in 2008. Determined to make his poetry known, that same year Moix also rescued -together with the translator and specialist Pilar Somacarrera-

, one of Atwood's best poetry books, published in 1981.

The two editions of Bruguera are out of print, such as the previous

(in Pretexts, 1991),

(in Icaria, 2000) and the even more difficult to find

(in Hiperión, 2000).

Only in Catalan is there a short anthology of 2019,

(Edicions de 1984).

But in Spanish his work remains practically unpublished.

And what is Atwood's poetry like?

extremely lucid and intelligent, sometimes even violent.

"Easy" in a non-cryptic sense: in her compositions she herself ironic about suffering poets, those of whom a line cannot be understood.

And although he builds landscapes of great beauty, in his poetic writing there is a certain renunciation of bucolic lyricism.

Atwood has no qualms about slipping bacon eggs, hockey winters, or

into his verses.

It is not that it makes the trivial eternal, nor that the everyday sublime.

Do your poems explain your narrative?

Are there reading keys for your novels?

Yes and no.

The themes and irony are clearly Atwoodian.

And it even tells stories, only more intimate, fleeting.

But if she had signed the poems with a pseudonym, no one would know how to recognize her in them, as

assured her

in 1985, in a mythical interview in the

: a

between the two great writers of Canada and the United States (Both sound each year like candidates for a Nobel that does not reach them).

At 80, Atwood continues to play with words and free verses: in 'Dearly' he writes again about absence, melancholy, the passing of years, devastated nature and ... mermaids, werewolves, zombies and Aliens.

She has her own imagery.

And it is always high voltage.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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