araging tone. This poem delineates from the feelings of intense love in the other two poems, but it is important to notice that Atwood has avoided, yet again, boxing the two characters into sexual identities, thus, the reader is free to interpret the relationship in “Postcard” according to their own experience or imagination. What is also apparent in “Postcards” is that Atwood sidesteps the usual trappings of what we expect love to be. “Variations on the Word Sleep” depicts a psychological or dream-like journey which intensified the idea of connection and sacrifice, while “Variations of the Word Love’ pulls new meaning out of such connections by denying the reduction of language. “Postcard” is certainly less optimistic about love, but again we see Atwood attempting to transcend the ordinariness of romance. Just as magazines are often inept at capturing the essence of our connections, so are corny vacation postcards. Instead of using the back of the postcard for forced simplicity and reduced senses of time, Atwood writes “time comes in waves here, a sickness, one/ day after the other rolling on; / I move up, its called/ awake, then down into the uneasy / nights but never / forward”. Again, Atwood has a perceptive sense of movement in her poetry. As we have seen before, she used words such as “enter,” “over,” and “follow,” in the previous lines, and in “Postcards” Atwood rocks her readers into queasiness with the words “rolling on,” “up,” “down into,” and “never froward.” The narrator’s vacation has become an absurd foreign nightmare, and the “glossy image” on the front of the postcard serves as a metaphor for the dark realities of being disconnected from others.In conclusion, Margaret Atwood’s poetry is not what one might expect from a femi...
