Morning in the Burned House is Margaret Atwood's first book of new poetry in a decade. The beautifully crafted poems—by turns dark, playful, intensely moving, tender, and intimate—make up her most accomplished and versatile gathering of poems to date, "setting foot on the middle ground/between body and word." Some draw on history, some on myth, both classical and popular. Others, more personal, 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. But they also inhabit a contemporary landscape haunted by images of the past. Generous, searing, compassionate, and disturbing, this is poetry that rises out of human experience to seek a level between luminous memory and the realities of the everyday, between the capacity to inflict and the strength to forgive. Morning in the Burned House is infused with a clarity of vision that has the force to change the way we look at our lives.