‘But still, time vanishes’: timescapes of immediacy in Margaret Atwood’s Paper Boat (2024)

This paper analyses the materiality of temporality in Margaret Atwood’s ‘Uncollected Poems II (1991–2023)’ from her recent volume Paper Boat (2024) through the lens of Barbara Adam’s theory of timescapes. Atwood’s poetry resists linear narratives, as she crafts temporal terrains where temporalities blur. Through close readings of the poems, the article demonstrates how Atwood transforms time into a material and affective landscape shaped by memory, loss, and recurrence. These poems unfold recursive structures, liminal spaces, and fragile moments of immediacy, offering a poetics of return and repetition that reframes temporality as embodied and relational. Atwood’s speaker navigates time’s instability by engaging with space, nature, and language, creating layered experiences that challenge the invisibility of time. Ultimately, the paper argues that these previously unpublished poems construct timescapes that foreground the material and emotional textures of time, urging readers to re-enter poetic space as a form of temporal resistance and existential continuity.