Circle Game by Margaret Atwood

INTRODUCTION
by Sherrill Grace
    Margaret Atwood’s first major book of poetry,
The Circle Game
, won her the Governor General’s Award for 1966, and in many other ways announced her arrival as an important contemporary poet. The title poem first appeared in a limited folio edition in 1965, designed, illustrated, and printed by Charles Pachter. Contact Press then published the entire collection in 1966, but this edition quickly went out of print and a new one was published the following year by House of Anansi Press. In her
Selected Poems
(1976), Margaret Atwood included fewer than half of the poems that appear in the original
Circle Game
, and hence the reader of the
Selected
has only a limited sense of the book as a unified whole. This Anansi reprinting, then, is especially welcome, for it indicates the lasting importance of the collection and provides an opportunity to reconsider the first major work of one of our finest writers.
    Upon publication, the book was generally wellreceived and most reviewers recognized the appearance of an authentic and distinctive voice. However, certain fallacies which have always plagued the understanding of Atwood’s work arose in these early reviews: she was labelled an autobiographical writer in the narrowest sense and as a “mythopoeic poet” who followed the precepts of the so-called Frye school. Further misreading of her work was to come later with the publication of
The Journals of Susanna Moodie
(1970),
Power Politics
(1971), and
Survival
(1972), and her adoption by American feminists and Canadian nationalists.
    If one compares Atwood’s earlier poems — those published in
Alphabet
or in her first chapbook,
Double Persephone
, for example — with the poems in
The Circle Game
, one is struck by
The Circle Game’s
maturity, its new assurance of voice, form, and approach. The acerbic wit, the cool detachment, and the authority and control, now recognized as integral to the Atwood voice, are present in
The Circle Game
, as well as the distinctive aural-visual dynamic of the style, and Atwood’s intense preoccupation with the double aspect of life. Also characteristic is the spareness of the punctuation (except for parentheses), the controlled patterning of the lines and section breaks. Thematically, Atwood here explores many of the concerns that have continued to intrigue her — the traps of reality, myth, language, and the pernicious roles we play, the cage of the self, and above all, the nature of human perception.
    Although one must be wary of forcing too rigid an order upon the poems, the arrangement of
The Circle Game
does suggest a definite pattern. The opening poems present a variety of circle games within which the speaker struggles for an escape. The growing sense of defeat and impasse climaxes in the title poem, “The Circle Game,’ when the speaker realizes that she wants to break the circle. Several poems follow in which the speaker tries various escape-routes, until a sense of equilibrium is attained in the final three poems. This balance occurs, in part, through the development of both the reader’s and the speaker’s perception. The opening poem, “This Is a Photograph of Me,” challenges our perception immediately, asking us to adjust our sights, to find out where this particular voice is coming from. If we can learn how to do this, the voice promises us that “eventually/you will be able to see me.” The ironic double structure of this poem, its emphasis on seeing, and its sharp visual imagery urgesus to rediscover our senses and our relationship with the world.
    The title poem portrays the danger of misperceiving the roles we assume and the games we play in our personal relations. Images of rooms, mirrors, and circles create the sense of claustrophobic entrapment:
    Being with you
here, in this room
    is like groping through a mirror
whose glass has melted
to the consistency
of gelatin
    You refuse to