Margaret Atwood's poetry explores the real world and a haunting private universe. Both are seen by a young woman totally committed to the search for a viable human world, one capable of containing its opposites: of reconciling the individual's inner and outer worlds, the chaos and the longing for order, the isolation of lovers, the craving for life and the fact of death. The poems in this new collection are less subjective than Miss Atwood's earlier ones, and the range of themes is wider, but they contain the same tension and give the same impression of a 'quiet Mata Hari..who pits herself against the ordered, too clean world like an arsonist'.