“I want this to be a small book, / a small, slight book, easy to carry, / the sort of book you would tuck in at the last minute / to read on a plane.” I laughed out loud when I read this; only Margaret Atwood would have the deadpannery to place a poem called Small Book on page 520 of such a big one. Paper Boat unfolds across more than six decades, collecting some of her earliest published work – she began as a poet – and sampling all 14 of her collections so far. Two of these are reprinted here complete, Power Politics (1971) and Dearly (2020), both in their ways books about love. The first will never not be near-terrifying and simultaneously strangely freeing in its viscerality, its acid bite. The latter is so moving and expansive about love and loss that out of its wryness, its gravitas and its deep sadness blooms something far beyond the word “moving”.

But then Atwood’s work, her poetry in particular, has always asked words – or maybe us – to press beyond any settled expectations. If I open this book at random, here’s a poem called Reindeer Moss on Granite, where moss on a stone is its own “tiny language”:

Thousands of spores, of rumours
infiltrating the fissures,
moving unnoticed into
the ponderous is of the boulder,
breaking down rock.

Again at random, here’s Another Joan of Arc Poem. The saint has been transformed into a glass sphere washing up among plastic rubbish on a “dilapidated shore”, a message inside it “on a wisp of paper, / each letter clear, / each word illegible”.

“There are always concealed magical forms in poetry,” Atwood said in an interview in the 1970s. “You can take every poem and trace it back to a source in either prayer, curse, charm or incantation.” What a book of magic Paper Boat is, huge but somehow still unassuming, perhaps because of its steady-eyed passage through a history and a life, its open continuance, even though so many of its poems deal directly with how “momentary” we are. In Negotiating With the Dead (2000) she noted how “Rilke, in his Sonnets to Orpheus, makes the underworld journey simply a precondition of being a poet”. This new collection is as sanguine as Atwood has always been when it comes to mortality, as well as the savagery all through nature and our natures; it bristles with “fears hairy as bears”.

Yet it’s a bright and cornucopic life force of a book, full of her wry debunking and myth-busting: “I might as well tell you,” as Ariadne says in Ariadne Sends a Message, “the minotaur / was my friend”. It resounds with the acuteness of Atwood’s wisdom, the warmth of her cold eye, her uniquely lit courage. “My trade is courage and atrocities. / I look at them and do not condemn. / I write things down the way they happened, / as near as can be remembered”, she writes in The Loneliness of the Military Historian, where a woman crosses “many battlefields / that once were liquid with pulped / men’s bodies … splayed bone. All of them have been green again / by the time I got there.”

Collected here, the poems suggest her preoccupation has always been transformation, and poetry, which she once called “the most joyful” of the literary forms, has been a taproot at the core of all her writing; from before the formation of 1960s feminism, the expansion of human rights movements, climate protest – also before much evidence of any substantial critical appreciation of centuries-long Canadian literary tradition, in all of which she and her work figure centrally. A warm autobiographical piece at the back of the book places each collection in contemporary context, starting with Double Persephone, which she set by hand in 1961 on a “small flatbed press”, printing 220 copies, priced at 50 cents.

Formal Garden, Paper Boat’s opening poem, is from this first collection. It concerns a girl with a “gorgon touch” who, looking for life, finds only a display of “too-perfect” statues everywhere she looks, “a marbled flesh / A fixing eye, a stiffened form / Where leaves turn spears along the glade”. From the start Atwood was asking the questions that have always preoccupied her: how to avoid what myth turns humans into; how to persuade an eye to unfix rather than skewer what it sees; how to deal with the violence inherent in nature; how to catch the aliveness of reality in art, the “petals that will crush and fade”. Already, too, she’s casting a shadow long enough to reach preoccupations in her most recent novel, 2019’s The Testaments, with its toppling of statues. This long shadow also stretches away from Houses, an early poem uncollected till now in which the speaker lives in house after house which simply structurally decompose until “what was all outside / Is inside”. Her work has been a catalyst in baring the nature of the structures by which we live, personal, social, even geological. Landscape, language and the human body meet and merge repeatedly in it; even this early, Atwood is foreseeing not just climate catastrophe but our ability to blank it, in this poem from The Circle Game (1964):

fish must be swimming
down in the forest beneath us …
the city, wide and silent,
is lying lost, far undersea.
You saunter beside me, talking
of the beauty of the morning,
not even knowing
that there has been a flood

There’s further treasure at the end of Paper Boat in a set of recent uncollected poems which acts as a doughty new collection itself. Small Book is one of these, and typically unnerving. It begins lightly, then driven by “melancholy impulse” and “rage” it turns into a one-way journey in which the “you” reading the poem crosses the world in consumerist fashion trying to avoid its strangeness and sadnesses, all the while searching for some meaning in an “easy to carry” book. But such a search, such a book:

has you by heart. It knows you backwards,
you and your sulky anguish, because you’re in it
now, you’re in this book,
it’s reading you, you’re caught by it, you can’t get out.

In turn, there’s no getting away from the feat or the sustenance of this astonishing, not-at-all small book, whose glance is direct and sidelong both at once. This is because Paper Boat is such good company, sassy and uncompromising, clear as glass and still mysterious. It begins in questioning and resistance. It gathers equanimity. It ends in understanding, its final two poems moments of shattering clarity formed round the small/huge words, thank you, now, love. It is all voice, story, touchstone, tough liberation. A joy.