I spent a chunk of yesterday copying out Margaret Atwood's 1995 collection Morning in the Burned House. While I have often read her poems alone or in anthologies, I had never before sat down with a entire book of them.

Like most people (I'm making an assumption here, and maybe I'm wrong), I think of Atwood as a novelist who sometimes writes poems. These kinds of novelists often exist. John Updike wrote poems, too, but do you think of him as a poet? I tend to think of him as someone who wrote poems to plug the gaps of his novel-writing life. Of course, this isn't the only way in which novel writers intersect with poetry. Emily Bronte was a poet who wrote a stunning, poetic novel. Sylvia Plath was a poet who wrote a novel that was also an intriguing and self-mythologizing memoir. My friend Baron Wormser is a narrative poet who has turned to the novel as a new narrative challenge (structurally, character-wise). My friend Thomas Rayfiel is a novelist who has turned to poetic sleight-of-hand as a challenge (pressing image and syntax into narrative service).

In Morning in the Burned House, Atwood's approach to poetry is different. As I copied out her poems, I began to feel as if they were blueprints, models, experimental drawings--beautifully colored, exquisitely arranged--for some bigger, more expansive undertaking. Individually they can be stunning. A number of these poems are persona pieces, written from the point of view of characters as varied as the Hollywood star Ava Gardner and the Egyptian goddess Sekhmet. These characters are always in a strange situation (Gardner has been resurrected as a flower, Sekhmet is a statue in a museum), and the poems arise from the way in which the characters come to terms with both their present and their past as well as the expectations and assumptions of others (mostly clueless men).

The problem is that, in a collection, many of these voices start to sound similar. As I copied one after another, I thought of Rainer Maria Rilke's persona poems--"The Dwarf's Song," "The Drunkard's Song," and so on. They, too, share a similar-sounding voice. So why do Rilke's become more and more heart-rending as a group? Part of the problem is Atwood's attraction to the sound of a smart-aleck, hard-as-nails, hot-lips, I-can-shoot-you-between-the-eyes-while-smoking-this-cigarette, Raymond Chandler-esque tough girl . . . an affection that I share. But in quantity, it flattens and overwhelms. And this is at least part of the reason that the poems feel like blueprints: it's as if the poet said, "What if I put this outfit on her? Now how about this one?" In other words, the poems sometimes feel like practice for novels.

I admire Atwood very much, and not only for her clean, snappy metaphors; her gorgeous, economic interplays between static settings and dramatic tension. I also like what I've just pointed out as a flaw: the insouciance of so many of her female characters. That's the conundrum of this collection. Frankly, it is a relief to stand outside of women's self-flagellation and guilt. In her poem "The Loneliness of the Military Historian" (which is not at all Chandler-esque), her character remarks:

In general I might agree with you:
women should not contemplate war,
should not weigh tactics impartially,
or evade the word enemy,
or view both side and denounce nothing.
Women should march for peace,
or hand out white feathers to arouse bravery,
spit themselves on bayonets
to protect their babies,
whose skulls will be split anyway,
or, having been raped repeatedly,
hang themselves with their own hair.
These are the functions that inspire general comfort.
That, and the knitting of socks for the troops
and a sort of moral cheerleading.
Also: mourning the dead.
Sons, lovers, and so forth.
All the killed children.

As I copied out her words, I remembered listening to a radio reporter talk about the Syrian government's recent evacuation of all non-combatants from the city of Homs. To count as a non-combatant, a person must be (1) younger than age 16 or older than age 55 or (2) female. If my family were in Homs, I would be the only member allowed to leave. I would be permitted to rot alone in a refugee camp where I could spend my hours picturing the brutalized corpses of my sons and my husband. With such an image in my mind, I found Atwood's precise irony both terrifying and tonic.

Despite the propaganda, there are no monsters,
or none that can be finally buried.
Finish one off, and circumstances
and the radio create another.