The Journals of Susanna Moodie: Poems - Softcover

Atwood, Margaret

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0195401697 ISBN 13: 9780195401691

Publisher: OUP Canada, 1970

Synopsis

This cycle of poems is perhaps the most memorable evocation in modern Canadian literature of the myth of the wilderness, the immigrant experience, and the alienating and schizophrenic effects of the colonial mentality. Since it was first published in 1970 it has not only acquired the stature of a classic but, reprinted many times, become the best-known extended work in Canadian poetry. Susanna Moodie (1805-85) emigrated from England in 1832 to Upper Canada, where she settled on a farm with her husband. She wrote several books in Canada, notably Roughing It in the Bush, a famous account of pioneering that is still widely read. In poems about the arrival and the Moodies' seven years in the bush, which were followed by a more civilized ilfe in Belleville, and about Mrs Moodie in old age and then after death - in the present, when she observes the twentieth century destroying her past and its meaning - Margaret Atwood has created haunting meditations on an English gentlewoman's confrontation with the wilderness, and compelling variations on the themes of dislocation and alienation, nature and civilization. The poems are supplemented by Margaret Atwood's collages and an 'Afterword' in which the poet says: 'We are all imigrants to this place even if we were born here....'

About this title

Review:

In 1832, a 29-year-old Englishwoman departed for Canada with her family. The product of a genteel upbringing, Susanna Moodie had already established somewhat of a reputation as a writer of essays, poetry and children's stories. None of this, however, prepared her for the rigours of pioneer life, which she chronicled in two volumes of autobiography and eventually came to cherish. Moodie died in 1885, and-- almost a century later--Margaret Atwood seized upon this quintessential pioneer as the subject for a verse epic. In The Journals of Susanna Moodie, Atwood uses Moodie's own words as raw material, reshaping and cutting them into a startling meditation on nature, alienation and our sense of place:

We left one by one
the cities rotting with cholera,
one by one our civilized
distinctions
and entered a large darkness.
It was our own
ignorance we entered.

Atwood's epic was first published in 1970 and reappeared in a 1980 limited edition featuring illustrations by Charles Pachter, and it is this version that Houghton Mifflin had the good sense to reprint. The result is an elegant artefact, a fitting tribute to an emblematic figure--a woman who Carol Shields has described as "a Crusoe baffled by her own heated imagination, the dislocated immigrant who never fully accepts or rejects her adopted country."

About the Author:

Author of more than 40 books, Margaret Atwood has won as many awards, including the Union Poetry Prize (Chicago), the Bess Hoskins Prize (Chicago), the Radcliffe Graduate Medal, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Welsh Arts Council International Writers Prize, the Los Angeles Times Fiction Writers Award, the Ritz Hemingway Prize (Paris), the Arthur C. Clarke Award for best Science Fiction, the John Hughes Prize of the Welsh Development Board, and a Centennial Medal from Harvard University. Her work has been translated into more than sixteen languages.

About this edition

• Publisher: OUP Canada
• Publication date: 1970
• ISBN 10: 0195401697
• ISBN 13: 9780195401691
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 64