To criticize Margaret Atwood's work would require that I forget how much I admired her. Edible Woman, Surfacing and Lady Oracle had been personal supports for me, sturdy fictions knotted with so many of the unmentionable feelings most women and many men recognize. Surely she would bring to her Selected Poems the sardonic messages of her fiction? But she didn't. Not at first, anyway. The initial awkwardness of Selected Poems, however, only underscores the book's resolution.

The Circle Game (1966), first of the six in this collection, seems to begin at the end of something—romantic love? To be sure, love is a recurrent theme for Atwood. The poems included from this book vacillate from monosyllabic punch, to flagrant paunch. A sullen, unfocused anger that will neither burn nor quite die out, is reflected in these poems. There is nothing wrong with writing about life's cool fevers, but Atwood's...