Margaret Atwood is the author of more than fifty books of fiction, poetry, and critical essays. Her novels include Cat’s Eye, The Robber Bride, Alias Grace, The Blind Assassin, and the MaddAddam trilogy. Her 1985 classic, The Handmaid’s Tale, was followed in 2019 by a sequel, The Testaments, which was a global number one bestseller and won the Booker Prize. In 2020 she published Dearly, her first collection of poetry in a decade, followed in 2022 with Burning Questions, a selection of essays from 2004–2021. Her most recent collection of short stories, Old Babes in the Wood, was published in March 2023. In October 2024, Paper Boat, a collection of new and selected poems from 1961–2023, was published.
Atwood has won numerous awards, including the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Imagination in Service to Society, the Franz Kafka Prize, the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. In 2019, she was made a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour for services to literature. She has also worked as a cartoonist, illustrator, librettist, playwright, and puppeteer. She lives in Toronto, Canada.
Selected poems
by Margaret Atwood
In the early morning an old woman
is picking blackberries in the shade.
It will be too hot later
but right now there’s dew.
Some berries fall: those are for squirrels.
Some are unripe, reserved for bears.
Some go into the metal bowl.
Those are for you, so you may taste them
just for a moment.
That’s good times: one little sweetness
after another, then quickly gone.
Once, this old woman
I’m conjuring up for you
would have been my grandmother.
Today it’s me.
Years from now it might be you,
if you’re quite lucky.
The hands reaching in
among the leaves and spines
were once my mother’s.
I’ve passed them on.
Decades ahead, you’ll study your own
temporary hands, and you’ll remember.
Don’t cry, this is what happens.
Look! The steel bowl
is almost full. Enough for all of us.
The blackberries gleam like glass,
like the glass ornaments
we hang on trees in December
to remind ourselves to be grateful for snow.
Some berries occur in sun,
but they are smaller.
It’s as I always told you:
the best ones grow in shadow.
Copyright © 2020 by Margaret Atwood, Dearly, Penguin Random House Canada
Blackberries
I practise the outworn Victorian art
Of hooking wool roses to cover
The piano legs; limbs rather; but under
These ornate surfaces, the hard
Naked wood is still there.
I am industrious and clever
With my hands: I execute in paint
Landscapes on doorpanels and screens.
Down my arranged vistas, furniture
And pillows flourish in plump scenery
And on my table stands a miniature
Lemon tree in a small china garden.
It is prudent to thus restrain one’s eden
Indoors. I never eat my bitter lemons
And everything remains in its own spot
Except the devil, who is under the piano
With a fringed purple tablecloth over
Him. I hear him sucking lemon rinds.
I cannot make him blend with my decor
Even with roses: his tail sticks out behind.
Copyright © 2024 by Margaret Atwood, Paper Boat: New and Selected Poems 1961-2023, McClelland & Stewart