The evolution of Margaret Atwood's poetry since she began writing it twenty-five years ago illuminates one of our major literary talents. "Selected Poems II" contains seventy-three poems, some of them extensive, drawn from her work since 1975, and it includes a number of poems never previously published in the United States. As in her fiction ( "Surfacing, Lady Oracle, Life Before Man, The Handmaid's Tale, Bluebeard's Egg" ) Atwood ruminates on oppression and injustice and on the genders and their discontents, but beyond these surface dissonances we hear the music of compassion and fellowship and love.