These beautifully crafted poems –by turns dark, playful, intensely moving, tender and intimate– come together asMargaret Atwood'smost accomplished and versatile gathering of poems to date, “setting foot on the middle ground/between body and word.”Some draw on history, and on myth, both classical and popular. Other, more personal poems concern themselves with love, with the fragility of the natural world, and with death–especially in the elegiac series of meditations on the death of a parent–as they inhabit a contemporary landscape haunted by images of the past. Generous, compassionate, and disturbing, this is poetry that emanates from the heart of the human experience and seeks balance between the luminous realm of memory and the realities of every day, between darkness and light, the capacity to perpetrate and the strength to forgive."Atwood's poems are short, glistening with terse, bright images, untentative, closing like a vice... Plain, explicit poetry, perfectly sure of itself."-TheNew York TimesMorning in the Burned Houseis infused with breathtaking insight, technical virtuosity, and a clarity of vision that has the force to change the way we look at our lives.