Presence and Absence in Margaret Atwood’s Dearly

In Morning in the Burned House (1995), Margaret Atwood includes a sequence of elegiac poems mourning the process of her father’s illness and death. Her subsequent collection, The Door (2007), while not explicitly elegiac, explores topics such as memory, aging, death, loss, and decay. These subjects are often central to both traditional and contemporary elegies. Other poems in this volume deal with writing and poetry, examining their capacity to offer consolation in the face of death, a key as...