It is the life-impulse [Atwood] uncovers and venerates [in Surfacing] alone on the island peeling off her civilized skins. This is the impulse [she] uncovers in her poetry, honoring the claim-to-life of whatever lives.
The narrator of Surfacing sees a heron killed for sport hanging in a tree and is as powerfully converted as Saint Eustace coming upon the stag with the cross between its antlers…. Her magnified understanding is not occupied with what the heron might stand for, or mean to humans, but with the mutilated bird itself, the violation of its life. Atwood's birds and beasts aren't symbols. She hails in each thing its own life, and its own physique: for her these are enough to express its sacredness. (p. 19)
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