Margaret Atwood has revealed that her poem 'Dearly' was written in August 2017 while she was walking alone in Stratford, Ontario, as her partner Graeme Gibson was living with a dementia diagnosis. The poem, which gives its name to her latest collection, was composed on a back street with a pencil or rollerball on a notebook page, using 'early 21st-century Canadian English'.
Atwood explained that she was walking alone because Gibson, with whom she had walked hundreds of miles since 1971, could no longer accompany her due to his failing knees and the progression of his dementia. He had been diagnosed in 2012. 'We were five years into it,' she wrote. 'We knew the what, but we didn't know the when.'
Gibson died in September 2019, two days after the London launch of Atwood's novel 'The Testaments'. His death from a massive haemorrhagic stroke was 'quick, relatively painless, and while he was still himself'. Atwood noted that all the poems about Gibson in 'Dearly' were written before his death, describing it as 'pre-mourning'.
The essay also touches on Atwood's experiences with the TV adaptation of 'The Handmaid's Tale', which launched in April 2017, and the mini-series of 'Alias Grace'. She noted that both were 'backlit by the lurid glow cast by the 2016 presidential election'.
