; Atwood described the word love as being “single vowel in this metallic/ silence, a mouth that says/ O again and again in wonder/ and pain, a breath, a finger/ grip on a cliffside”(802). Here, Atwood captures the desperation of love while also finding new angles with which to celebrate it. Her last stanza gives the reader a feeling of transcendence without a single use of the word “love,” which strengthens her theme. As in the previous poem, her description of the emotions shared between two people has surpassed conventional interpretations of intimacy.The third poem, “Postcard,” is yet another example of Atwood’s talent for redesigning the concept of love. Just as we have seen before, Atwood is interested in the ways in which both words and literary mediums convey the sense of human relationships. In this poem, she studies the words that might go on a conventional postcard, and also how reality differs from the usual declarations of love that come in the mail. The first line of the poem is representative of what one might expect on the back of a postcard: “I’m thinking of you. What else can I say?” but Atwood immediately dissects the allusion of an ideal vacation with a perfect love waiting across the sea. She describes the surroundings as being dirty and disappointing, and the reader gets the sense that her words may apply to the narrator’s relationship as well: “What we have are the usual/ fractured coke bottles and the smell/ of backed-up drains, too sweet, / like a mango on the verge/ of rot, which we have also”. One must be careful not to oversimplify Atwood’s images here, but it is interesting to interpret this putrid environment as a metaphor for the disintegrating relationship between the writer and the addressee. The “backed-up drains,” for instance, and the rotting sweetness are indicative of the poem’s dark, disp...
