[Much] of True Stories consists of a kind of poetic actuality, a continuing oblique comment on the world that is our here and now. It is perhaps the best verse Atwood has written, honed down to a stark directness, an accuracy of sound, yet imbued with the visual luminosity that makes poetry more than a verbal exercise. It tells us not only of the abdication of reason, but also of the tyranny of the senses and the cruel proximity of violence and love.

One of the striking aspects of True Stories, which it shares with much of the poetry in Atwood's previous volume Two-Headed Poems, is the metamorphic process by which thoughts merge into sensations, so that the mind seems imprisoned in its flesh, yet things in a curious and compensating way become liberated into thought….

The constant interplay between the sensual and the intellectual, between things and...