Margaret Atwood's Two-Headed Poems are full of interesting ideas, memorable images, and intelligent observations. She has a deep understanding of human motivation, and her poetry deals naturally with an intricate sort of psychology most poets ignore. Her poems are often painfully accurate when dealing with the relationships between men and women or mothers and daughters. And yet with all these strengths, Atwood is not an effective poet. She writes poetry with ideas and images, not with words; her diction lies dead on the page. Her poems have a conceptual and structural integrity, but the language itself does not create the heightened awareness one looks for in poetry. The problem centers in her rhythms, not only the movement of words and syllables within the line, but also the larger rhythms of the poem, the movements from line to line and stanza to stanza. While the pacing of her ideas works beautifully, her language never picks up force.
One notices the curious neutrality of Atwood's language most clearly in her sequence of prose poems, "Marrying the Hangman," which obliquely tells the story of Françoise Laurent, a woman sentenced to death for stealing, who legally avoids punishment by convincing the man in the next cell to become a hangman and then marrying him. (Atwood uses a real historic incident here, but the plot seems like something out of a Mascagni opera.) The language in these prose poems is qualitatively no different from the language of her verse, except that it has no line breaks. It most resembles a passage of "elevated" prose, like an excerpt from Joan Didion's histrionic Book of Common Prayer.
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