Dearly by Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood’s Dearly, her first poetry collection in nearly a decade, marks the return of one of literature’s most versatile voices. Published in 2020, the book blends wry humor with elegiac reflection, moving between love, memory, aging, and ecological loss. Atwood writes about long partnerships, the persistence of grief, and the fragility of the natural world, often with her signature sharp wit and unflinching clarity. Dearly shows how poetry remains central to her body of work, offering an intimate counterpoint to her celebrated novels.

Rediscovering Margaret Atwood’s Poetic Voice After Nearly a Decade in Dearly

Margaret Atwood’s Dearly marks her first poetry collection in more than ten years and shows a writer still at the height of her craft. Published in 2020, the book gathers poems that confront aging, memory, ecological crisis, enduring love, and the presence of grief. Atwood moves between intimate subjects, such as the changes of the body and the loss of relationships, and broader global concerns, including environmental collapse and species extinction.

Although she is best known for novels including The Handmaid’s Tale and Alias Grace, Dearly proves that her poetic voice carries equal force. Her wit cuts through meditations on mortality, her humor lightens even the darkest observations, and her precise language distills vast realities into sharp, unforgettable lines. Dearly does more than remind readers of Atwood’s range. It confirms poetry as a space where she continues to confront vulnerability, find clarity, and speak to the fragility of our shared world.

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Themes of Love, Loss, and Time

The poems in Dearly return again and again to love and loss, expressed with a raw honesty that captures the universal weight of grief, aging, and memory. The title poem, “Dearly,” reflects on mourning with language that is spare yet deeply evocative, a meditation on the ways absence lingers in words, relationships, and recollection. It sets the tone for the entire collection, where the losses that shape life are presented without sentimentality but with profound clarity.

Atwood’s treatment of time moves beyond personal reflection to larger existential questions. In “Silver Slippers,” she balances humor with melancholy, turning the inevitability of aging into something both absurd and poignant. Small images—shoes, gestures, fleeting moments—become symbols of how life accumulates and slips away.

Other poems expand this reckoning into ecological concerns. “Zombie” imagines the natural world pressing back against human destruction, its biting humor underscoring a serious warning about environmental collapse. Here, Atwood intertwines mortality with climate anxiety, reminding readers that loss is not confined to individual lives but extends to the fragile systems that sustain them.

This ability to weave the intimate with the universal remains one of Atwood’s greatest strengths in Dearly, showing that vulnerability, humor, and mortality often exist side by side.

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Environmental and Political Undertones

In Dearly, Atwood brings her ecological and political voice to the forefront, using poetry to confront the crises shaping the twenty-first century. In “Zombie,” she imagines the environment returning humanity’s indifference with a grim sense of humor, the natural world reanimated as a force of reckoning. “Plasticene Suite” takes aim at the age of disposability, tracing the permanence of plastic and its quiet invasion of oceans, landscapes, and bodies. These poems blend sharp warning with imagery that is unsettling in its familiarity, transforming environmental collapse into something visceral and immediate.

Her political awareness surfaces in equal measure. Poems gesture toward the pressures of surveillance, the numbing pace of technological dependence, and the erosion of human intimacy in an era mediated by screens. Instead of delivering didactic critique, Atwood crafts lines that invite readers to recognize themselves within these patterns—complicit, endangered, and capable of change. Through this balance of satire and stark clarity, Dearly connects personal vulnerability with the broader fractures of the world we inhabit.

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A Return to Lyrical Elegance

Atwood’s poetic style in Dearly is defined by clarity, rhythm, and restraint. She favors language that feels conversational yet layered, allowing her to move fluidly between intimacy and universality. This precision lets her confront aging, grief, and ecological anxiety without burdening the reader with abstraction. Her humor, often dark and sly, cuts through moments of despair, reminding us that wit can coexist with sorrow.

The imagery across the collection amplifies this balance. Atwood draws on gardens, insects, ancient myth, and everyday memory to anchor her meditations. In one poem, she contemplates the persistence of spiders weaving webs where human structures decay, a metaphor for resilience and fragility in the face of collapse. The result is poetry that feels immediate, grounded in sensory detail, and deeply attuned to the contradictions of life.

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Cementing Atwood’s Legacy as a Poet

Although Atwood’s reputation has been shaped by novels such as The Handmaid’s Tale and Alias Grace, Dearly underscores her stature as a poet of lasting influence. The collection stands alongside her earliest work, beginning with Double Persephone in 1961, while revealing the wisdom of a writer reflecting on decades of creativity, activism, and personal experience.

The themes are unmistakably wide-reaching. Love and grief are treated with unflinching honesty, environmental collapse is portrayed as both intimate and global, and the passage of time is rendered through images of memory that transcend generations. For longtime admirers, Dearly is a reminder of how central poetry has always been to Atwood’s voice. For new readers, it offers an entry point into her full body of work, revealing a poet who remains sharp, inventive, and enduringly relevant.