Double Persephone

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Double Persephone is a Canadian poetry collection written by Canadian author Margaret Atwood in 1961. The book comprises of seven poems. It was the first publication ever released by Atwood.

In the opening poem of Double Persephone a "girl with the gorgon touch" walks through a formal garden searching for "a living wrist and arm". However all she finds is a "a line of statues" with "marble flesh." This "gorgon" is apparently Medusa, whose glance turned men to stone. In the concluding poem of Atwood's most recent collection of new work, You Are Happy, another male figure appears with similarly sculptural qualities:

On the floor your body curves

like that: the ancient pose, neck slackened, arms

thrown above the head, vital

throat and belly lying

undefended . light slides over you. . . . . (96)

However this statue comes to life, out of the worlds of art and ritual and into that of flesh:

this is not an altar, they are not

acting or watching

You are intact, you turn

towards me, your eyes opening, the eyes

intricate and easily bruised. . . .

("Book of Ancestors," 96)

In the seven books of poems Atwood develops an intricate balance between the mythological, or the sculptural and the kinetic, and the actual, and the temporal. Atwood's consideration of this opposition has been simultaneously ethical and aesthetic; all attitudes toward form in her work have been subject to moral judgments.

The sources of this antithesis lie in the earliest days of Anglo-American modernism with its deepest roots in T. E. Hulme's rejection of nineteenth-century empathetic realism. The formal garden depicted in the Double Persophone poetry can be created and entered, but its marble flesh cannot be lifted from still dance into dancing life.

Atwood followed up the collection with another book of poetry relaeased in 1964, The Circle Game.