Sherrill Grace

“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 It is as if the speaker in the earlier poems, having found escape from circle games impossible, has withdrawn into the self only to discover that she is enclosed in the final, most dangerous circle: “it is easier for me to lose my way/forever here, than in other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.”
― Sherrill Grace

“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.”
― Sherrill Grace