These beautifully crafted poems - by turns dark, playful, intensely moving, tender, and intimate - make up Margaret Atwood's most accomplished and versatile gathering to date, "setting foot on the middle ground / between body and word." Generous, searing, compassionate, and disturbing, this poetry rises out of human experience to seek a level between luminous memory and the realities of the everyday, between the capacity to inflict and the strength to forgive Front Matter -- Half Title -- BOOKS BY MARGARET ATWOOD -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS -- Contents -- I. -- You Come Back -- A Sad Child -- In the Secular Night -- Waiting -- February -- Asparagus -- Red Fox -- II. -- Miss July Grows Older -- Manet's Olympia -- Daphne and Laura and So Forth -- Cressida to Troilus: A Gift -- Ava Gardner Reincarnated as a Magnolia -- Helen of Troy Does Counter Dancing -- A Man Looks -- Sekhmet, The Lion-Headed Goddess of War,Violent Storms, Pestilence, and RecoveryFrom Illness, Contemplates the Desertin The Metropolitan Museum of Art -- III . -- Romantic -- Cell -- The Loneliness of the Military Historian -- Marsh Languages -- Frogless -- Half-hanged Mary -- Owl Burning -- Down -- A Pink Hotel in California -- IV. -- Man in a Glacier -- Wave -- King Lear in Respite Care -- A Visit -- Dancing -- Bored -- Flowers -- Two Dreams -- The Time -- Two Dreams, 2 -- Oh -- The Ottawa River by Night -- V. -- Vermilion Flycatcher,San Pedro River, Arizona -- The Moment -- Up -- Girl Without Hands -- The Signer -- A Fire Place -- Statuary -- Shapechangers in Winter -- Morning in the Burned House
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