We begin the week here on My Poetic Side with a look at
another honour for Margaret Atwood. We also take a look at the poet who has
created poetry about burial objects for a museum.
Margaret Atwood Honoured by The Queen
Earlier this month, she was named a joint winner of the Booker Prize, and last week the poet and author Margaret Atwood was given a great honour by The Queen. Atwood was awarded an Order of the Companions of Honour for her significant services to literature.
The investiture service took place at Windsor Castle in
front of Queen Elizabeth II. This is a prestigious award that has only been
given to 62 other people. The award is given to those people who have made
outstanding achievements in the fields of politics, the arts or science. Atwood
is the third Canadian who has received this honour.
Perhaps best known for The Handmaid’s Tale, which was made into a television series which saw her becoming a household name, Atwood has in fact written over 40 books, everything from essays, to fiction and poetry.
When asked about the investiture Atwood said that she had
become a bit “emotional” at being awarded such a rare award. She also remarked
on how much The Queen has done in her lifetime and what an inspiration she is.
She also remarked that at her age, Atwood is 79, it is more common for someone
to start fading into the background but that is certainly not happening for
her.
The Testaments, which is the long-awaited sequel for The Handmaid’s Tale was published after a lengthy 34 years and was the novel that won Atwood the Booker Prize for Fiction which she shared with Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo, who was the first black woman to have ever won the prize.
A Poets Incite on Ancient Graves
The poet Michael Rosen
will be giving a talk at the British Museum during which he will be giving his
take on several prehistoric items that were included in burials. These items
include the Folkton drums.
Three of the items were buried with a child estimated to be six years old, four of them are gold discs and one is a bronze mirror. These items were buried, and remained lost and forgotten for thousands of years before being dug up.
Now they will be shown to the general public and combined with new poems by Rosen which will celebrate the fantastic nature of these long-forgotten grave finds.
Rosen will be reading the poems aloud on Halloween at the
Museum. They are special poems commissioned for the event by the museum and the
universities of Manchester and Reading. They form part of a project which is
hoping to help people understand the significance of burial objects and just
how important they were to the people they were buried with.
The Folkton drums were buried approximately 5000 years ago
with the body of a small child in North Yorkshire, The Knowes of Trotty in
approximately 2000BC with a woman’s body on Orkney and the Portesha mirror which
is intricately decorated in around AD 40-50 in Dorset with the body of an old
woman.
Rosen believes that poetry can help to unravel the emotions of
these ancient burial object and the symbolic power that they might have held.