Because Atwood is a better poet than a fiction writer, I have always read her novels and short stories with grudging admiration. Yes, I teach The Handmaid's Tale and The Edible Woman, and I recognize the ways in which these and other Atwood novels are exciting in the classroom and out of it, but I would much rather read, teach, talk about her poems.

That this view should run against the rising tide of Atwood's reputation as a novelist might only reflect on the increasingly rarefied readership of poetry in Canada outside of academic circles (increasingly rarefied, it almost seems, in inverse proportion to the rising number of books of poems published annually). More's the pity. But to my mind Good Bones demonstrates marvellously—as did Murder in the Dark to a lesser extent—how the fragmented and deceptively offhand form of these short pieces serves the turn of Atwood's imagination more powerfully than does her more conventional fiction. Despite what Atwood herself, or her publishers, might think Good Bones is all about (I heard her suggest to June Callwood on television two night ago—trust the tale, forget the teller—that the book is simply helping out a small literary press in hard times), the truth is that Good Bones is a much better book than, say, Wilderness Tips. This is no backhanded compliment; Good Bones pulses with a grim drollery that engages and entertains even as it looks back at tradition with a knowing little leer and ahead towards various versions of apocalypse with a deftly controlled grimace. These are fictions for our time, and, arguably, fictions that show Atwood's narrative talents at their finest.

I came to Good Bones ready to find in it all of the distinctive Atwood virtues, all of the strength that at times resonates less powerfully in her prose than in her poems (and that, tellingly, so often calls to mind's eye and ear, in this age that has so blithely proclaimed the death of the author, the pervasive and indecipherable life of text, Atwood's own face and voice): the ground-glass wit; the dry and cool and flat menace of her sentences, posed, posed, compressed, composed; the taut hilarity of characters, most often female, contemplating civil wreckage, domestic havoc, psychic chaos with casual terror; the steely insight delivered deadpan. They are all there and more. But Good Bones is worth glancing at, and rereading, and opening up at random because in these twenty-seven pieces (they are not stories, poems, postcards, fables—they really are fine pieces). Atwood is free both to call up and to dismember conventional demands for coherence, unity, plot complication and extension, and character development; she is more free to play, always a deadly serious game for Atwood, to invoke familiar storylines, tales, and traditions and to trick them out in new, riddling, fragmented form.

Among this collection's delights are its protean pluralities. Variations on traditional myths are retold with unnerving familiarity, featuring contemporary reincarnations of old protagonists: in “Bad News,” the opening piece, as a sleeping metamythical bird on a rooftop contemplates the unutterable boredom of uneventful mundaneity, readers can revel in a rhythm, diction, and tone worthy of Atwood's best poetry:

She perches on a rooftop, her brass wings folded, her head with its coiffure of literate serpents tucked beneath the left one, snoozing like a noon pigeon. There's nothing to do but her toenails.

This is canny writing, sinuous with allusion, alive with cliché made strange; at a glance, it is writing to spend time with, and not simply or primarily to see through or beyond. And it is typically of the writing in the collection.

As often as these pieces look pastwards from another perspective (try “Gertrude Talks Back” for a female and maternal corrective to a suddenly prissy Hamlet), they look ahead with elegant, stylish gloom to a sterile and attenuated world under a dome (“Hardball”), or at our own world from a point of view at once soothingly familiar and freakishly alien, the perspective of moths, bats, spermatozoa, of a consciousness from another planet (“Cold-Blooded,” “My Life as a Bat,” “Adventure Story,” and “Homelanding,” with its “cave people” and “prong people”: guess who?) Many pieces celebrate the skewed stories of women past and present, revelling in the status of the unloved ones—of the ugly sister, the witch (“I'm the plot, babe, and don't ever forget it” gloats the voice of “Unpopular Gals”)—and showing that the very impulse to tell stories often arises from the myriad sadnesses, the predictable loneliness and sorrow of women singled out (“Let Us Now Praise Stupid Women,” “The Female Body”). And the hoary old art of telling any story comes in for some self-consuming and revisionist pruning as the narrator of “There Was Once” is subjected to a mercilessly correct (and very funny) ideological inquisition.

Of course Atwood's men, those sly and silent, murderously abstract ghosts, are at large here again (“Making a Man,” “Epaulettes,” “Men At Sea”); they are artfully empty figures, and like so many of the creatures slipping along these pages, they seem to haunt and beguile the wry and rueful voice that reads them into being. And there is a new tone in amongst Atwood's better-known registers, a reflective, meditative tone that gently broods over mortality, its own and others'. You can hear it most clearly in the title piece at the end of the book, but it also inhabits passages of “Death Scenes,” for one.

As some elements in the Atwood canon recede into fixity—think of Survival, a bare twenty years later it is heartening to see how her new writing can still surprise us with its old fluency, its old delights. Good Bones, I am happy to report, is not a new Atwood novel, not just another book of stories. But it most ably shimmies and shakes, rattles and drolly rolls its bones—“them bones, them dry bones, them and their good connections.”