Margaret Atwood's work has a razor-edge incisiveness. Best-known for her literary thesis, Survival,… Atwood's extraordinary talent is in her poetry. Though unmistakably of this country in her images and tone, as a poet Atwood has always been more concerned with private than with public ghosts: the crippling boredom that can strangle love; the vicious cycle of self-gratification that tears men and women apart, and, on a more metaphysical level, the stubborn task of reconciling civilization with this land studded with rocks and peopled with indifference…. [This] singular woman writes with a steeliness unequalled in English poetry today. Her magnificent new book, Two-Headed Poems, is a spare, exquisite and merciless look at the many selves of the poet's persona. Such an examination might be a mere self-indulgence in the hands of a less inspired practitioner, but Atwood's art makes it universal. The two-headed poems are about every one of...