Dearly: Poems

Before she became one of the world's most celebrated novelists, Margaret Atwood was a poet. Dearly is her first collection of poetry in over a decade - a reckoning with love, loss, time, and the strange, fragile beauty of a world that is always slipping away. From the ache of grief to the darkly comic presence of zombies, these poems remind us why Atwood remains one of our most essential voices.

The Collection
Dearly brings together over fifty poems that move between the intimately personal and the urgently global. Atwood writes of her late partner, Graeme Gibson, with a spare and devastating restraint - "like hanging a hat / on a hook that's not there any longer". She writes of an aging cat losing its mind, of passports that hold the ghostly procession of who we once were, and of children growing up in a world without birds.

The Range
This is a collection of astonishing range. There are poems about Frida Kahlo and Cassandra, werewolves and werewolves' kin, mushrooms bringing news from underground, and a drone scanning wreckage. There are poems about the climate crisis, about the false weight given to what women wear, about the words we are losing to time - "dearly" and "sorrow" among them. Atwood moves from the traditional human grief to the fantastical, never losing her sharp, wry, unsentimental gaze.

Why This Book Matters
Atwood is now in her eighties. Dearly is the work of a lifetime - a collection that is by turns moving, playful, and profoundly wise. It is a book that burns in the here and now, shifting between pasts and futures. It does not offer easy comfort. It offers truth, beauty, and the unmistakable voice of a writer who has seen it all and refuses to look away.