Book Review
Title: The Door
Author: Margaret Atwood
Publisher: McLelland & Stewart
Released: September 11^th 2007
Pages: 128
ISBN-10: 0771008805
ISBN-13: 978-0771008801
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4 Stars

Reviewed By: Kindah Mardam Bey (Ontario Correspondent - Canada) 

Margaret Atwood is Canada's sage of literature, as is David Suzuki Canada's sage of science and environment. When we look for the Canadian literary compass, it resides in Atwood's many novels, children's books, and poetry books. I met Atwood once and her whole disposition was that of a learned professor, so every time I read her works, I feel as though she is teaching me something relevant to the shaping of my own humanity.

The Door is a beautiful collection of Atwood's reflections on her life, the love of her life and world in which she inhabits. Atwood has reared her swan like demeanour up to look at the reflection of herself as a writer as the poem ‘The Poet Has Come Back' showcases "The poet has come back to being a poet/after decades of being virtuous instead. (space) Can't you be both?/ No. Not in public." In fact, many of these poems are about her existence as a poet, and poetry in general; clearly she has missed the art form as a whole which `The Poet's Hang On' also examines the indirect approach of poetry. 

Atwood focuses her energy on three themes in The Door, as she does in her life, which is her writing, the love of her marriage, and environmentalism; what The Door has to offer afresh is Atwood's tongue-in-cheek editorializing of her life within those three subjects. Perhaps Atwood's greatest achievement as an author is her sophisticated wit, which reaches into the core of any matter.

Easily my favourite poem was the ‘Bear Lament,' which is a stark truth of our environmental gorging "not any more. I saw a bear last year,/against the sky, a white one,/rearing up with something of its former/heft. But it was thin as ribs/and growing thinner. Sniffing the brand-new/absences of rightful food/it tastes as ripped-out barren space/erased of meaning. So, scant/comfort there./Oh bear, what now?/And will the ground still hold? And how/much longer?"