nist writer. While her novels such as The Handmaid’s Tale and Alias Grace explore the feminine perspective, her poetry can be characterized by its genderless conscious and its unconventional portrayal of love. Atwood’s poetic voice defies the trappings of feminism in the sense that it embraces romantic images. Atwood shows the reader, through such poems as “Variations on the Word Sleep” that love transcends ordinary human activity, and chases it even into the depths of our consciousness and deepest fears. This poem captures the beauty of love by avoiding gender trappings and by carrying the reader through the boundaries of language. This is also true of her poem “Variations on the Word Love,” where Atwood gives us what language is incapable of and reshapes the language of human connection. Of course, Atwood’s poetry should not be oversimplified. In the poem “Postcards” we see a revival of the “high priestess of angst” that is predominant in her novels. “Postcards” is undoubtedly bitter: “Love comes/ in waves like the ocean, a sickness which goes on/ & on, a hollow cave/ in the head, filling and pounding, a kicked ear.” But again, Atwood has found a descriptive language to redefine love and overstep gender issues. The poetic voice in this poem makes the pain of absence clear to the reader, and again, we feel the power and pain of human connections. Atwood peels off the layers of consciousness to reveal a multi-faceted perspective on a usually clich subject. Love, through Atwood’s poetry, transcends our expectations of humanness and gender....
