Compare Dearly

The collection of a lifetime from the prodigious novelist and poet, now available as a paperback.By turns moving, playful, and wise, the poems gathered in Dearly are about absences and endings, ageing and retrospection, but also about gifts and renewals. They explore bodies and minds in transition, as well as the everyday objects and rituals that embed us in the present. Werewolves, sirens, and dreams make their appearance, as do various forms of animal life and fragments of our damaged environment. Before she became one of the world’s most important and loved novelists, Atwood was a poet. Dearly, her first collection in over a decade, brings together many of her most recognizable and celebrated themes, but distilled—from minutely perfect descriptions of the natural world to startlingly witty encounters with aliens, from pressing political issues to myth and legend. It is a pure Atwood delight, and long-term readers and new fans alike will treasure its insight, empathy, and humour. “Margaret Atwood has always been a poet; her poetry collections make visible the taproot of the wry, wise metaphysic that runs through her fiction and essays, and in a precarious time her new collection, Dearly, is a source of uncompromising elemental warmth.” —Ali Smith, Observer