Free Circle Game by Margaret Atwood Page A

be
(and I)
an exact reflection, yet
will not walk from the glass,
be separate.
    Underlying this apparent impasse is the perception that the alteration of things will be destructive for both partners: the speaker is “transfixed/by your eyes’/ cold blue thumbtacks”. But she also knows that “there is no joy” in the game, and that she wants “the circle/ broken”, regardless of the cost.
    Most of the poems in the collection focus upon the tension between opposites, whether male/female, order / chaos, day/night, rooms/open spaces, or the larger polarities of stasis and movement, self and other. “Journey to the Interior” explores the labyrinth of the self. It is as if the speaker in the earlier poems, having found escape from circle games impossible, has withdrawn into the self only to discover that she is enclosed in the final, most dangerous circle: “it is easier for me tolose my way/forever here, than in other landscapes”. The alternative is to abandon the egocentric self. In “Journey to the Interior,” Atwood expands the self-as-landscape metaphor, introduced in “This Is a Photograph of Me” and appearing again in the final poems of the book, because to see the self as other, as landscape, is a possible way out of the circle.
    Another path to freedom, in “Pre-Amphibian,” is sleep, where one is
    released
from the lucidities of day
when you are something I can
trace a line around …
    But this release is short-lived. We wake soon “with sunlight steaming merciless on the shores of morning”. In “Some Objects of Wood and Stone,” the speaker finds concrete comfort in physical objects, pebbles, and carvings. Through these objects, “single and/solid and rounded and really / there”, she is able to bypass the treachery of words and the limitations of sight. In “Against Still Life,” as the title implies, the speaker is determined to crack silences and force life to unfold its meaning.
    Release from circle games, tentative and rudimentary though it is, occurs in the last three poems. In “A Place: Fragments,” the speaker realizes that meaning does exist, not in opposition to “this confusion, this largeness/ and dissolving:/… but one/with it”. “The Explorers” and “The Settlers” depict life pared down to the essentials of bones and salt seas. Perhaps the deaths described in “The Explorers” are both necessary and propitious. At least they point forward to the harmony of “The Settlers,” where “our inarticulate/skeleton” is no longer “two skeletons”, but intermixed and one.The speaking voice in both these poems is neither trapped within circles nor immobilized by antinomies. This voice recalls the speaker in “This Is a Photograph of Me,’ in that it comes from beyond the circle of self and is “one with” the land. Consequently, the final lines of “The Settlers” are both beautiful and reassuring:
    Now horses graze
inside this fence of ribs, and
    children run, with green
smiles, (not knowing
where) across
the fields of our open hands.
    These simple images of happy children at one with nature offer an alternative vision to the earlier traps of self and reason.
    In
The Circle Game
, Margaret Atwood explores the fallibility of human perception and the concomitant dangers of the egocentric self. Whether in our use of language, our relationships with others, or our understanding of history and place, we distort and delimit life; our eyes are “cold blue thumbtacks”, our love affairs are joyless circle games, our words are barriers, and our cities are straight lines restraining panic. Freedom, these poems proclaim, is both necessary and dangerous. Consolation is possible via touch and physical objects, but in order to find that “place of absolute/ unformed beginning” for which the speaker longs in