The Journals of Susanna Moodie

This is Margaret Atwood at her best.

In this work, Atwood re-imagines the Canadian landscape through the eyes of one of Canada's first settlers, Susanna Moodie (1803-1885). The collection of poems, Atwood writes, were generated by a dream. "I dreamt I was watching an opera in the theatre: on the empty white stage, a single figure was singing."

The book presents a physical presence of absence, if you can imagine the meaning of it: a small book, with plenty of white space, and a small white voice on each page, resounding as clear as a clarion call across the bleak landscape. Atwood's dream incarnate.

Within the book, a few dozen poems and a few thousand words, at best, describe all the lives Susanna lived: from a comfortable class-conscious show more gentlewoman of the Strickland family in England, to a hinterland trailblazer in the wilds of Canada; and in the end, to writer of pioneer literature, a trailblazer of a different kind.

Atwood slices through all the layers: gentlewoman, pioneer, writer while she manages to capture the soul of a gentlewoman, captive in this harsh land. How harsh is the plight of the immigrant soul, in the end: when one relinquishes everything one has ever known and held dear in order to carve a different life from alien soil. Impossible to imagine at its deepest level. While we can comprehend the conditions, from a physical perspective, would we ever understand what it did to the soul? The wilderness, Atwood writes, is within and without. In order to survive, and prosper, one needs to reconcile the two, or all is lost; perhaps lost in madness. It takes the heart of a poet to understand that.

Further Arrivals

After we had crossed the long illness
that was the ocean, we sailed up river

On the first island
the immigrants threw off their clothes
and danced like sandflies

We left behind one by one
the cities rotting with cholera,
one by one our civilized
distinctions

and entered a large darkness.

It was our own
ignorance we entered.

I have not come out yet

My brain gropes nervous
tentacles in the night, sends out
fears hairy as bears,
demands lamps; or waiting

for my shadowy husband, hears
malice in the trees' whispers.

I need wolf's eyes to see
the truth.

I refuse to look in a mirror.

Whether the wilderness is
real or not
depends on who lives there. show less

Susanna Moodie was a real woman who emigrated to Canada in the 19th century and settled in a rural, undeveloped part of Ontario. Moodie wrote books about her experience as a settler. Atwood's series of linked poems are inspired by Moodie's books, particularly by the undercurrent of emotion that seems to contradict Moodie's words. Atwood's poetry reveals the hardships and loneliness of a woman's life on the frontier. It's accessible to readers who rarely read poetry, and it will appeal to poetry lovers.

This early book of poetry (1970) by Margaret Atwood contains meditative vignettes from the life of Susanna Moodie, an early Canadian pioneer. It's less a narrative than a series of private meditations of Moodie's life in the wilderness and later in the town of Belleville where the family settled . It concludes with a series of poems from beyond the grave in which Moodie's voice seems to transform into the land/idea of Canada itself. The book is illustrated with a series of Atwood's collages which help to evoke the early Canadian landscape and settlers.

"If the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania," Atwood concluded in 1970, "that of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia." These poems and art works are inspired by two 19th century books by Susanna Moodie, an immigrant from England.

one of my favourite Canadian women authors writes poems about one of my favourite pioneer Canadian women who happened to have settled here in my town...