I've been meaning to read this for a while and have finally got around to it, and I wish I'd read it sooner, because it's fantastic. The poems affect me more than the art, which I probably wouldn't enjoy so much if it were presented in another context, but the marriage between text and art here really does work... there's something very striking about the images, which are layered and confronting and work with the poems to form a complete and disturbing impression.

There is, I think, a tendency to romanticise early settler life from our life of electricity and relative ease. I'm not just talking about the ethical aspects of colonialism, but the day to day backbreaking labour of clearing land and planting and trying to impose a left-behind landscape onto the one that's in front of you. I've felt that nostalgic glow very occasionally, but never for long. I like indoor plumbing and hot water and washing machines too much to deceive myself into feeling that I'd enjoy a frontier life, and Susanna's own disgust with the whole horrible process is fair enough, I reckon. 

Part of me now wants to go and read the actual journals that inspired Atwood to write this collection, but given her (Atwood's) opinion that they weren't actually that interesting, from a literary point of view, I have to wonder if sticking to the impression might be more valuable than the primary source: there's something brutally honest about this collection, something that may in the end be a more accurate impression of the times. I especially liked, of all the excellent poems, "The Bush Garden," which reflects on how all these new plantings are underpinned by blood welling up out of the soil. Horrifyingly compelling.