The Circle Game

Bloomfield Hills, Michigan: Charles Pachter at Cranbrook Academy of Art, 1964. 8 folded sheets of handmade paper (18 x 14 1/2 inches). Each with a poem printed on the left hand side and a full-page black and white lithographic illustration on the right hand side. Original tissue guards. Signed and numbered by Charles Pachter on the colophon page. Unbound. Within blue printed paper wrappers handmade by Pachter and an original blind-stamped protective cloth chemise (19 x 15 inches)

Limited edition (Number 4 of 15) of The Circle Game, Margaret Atwood’s early poetry collection, with evocative illustrations by Charles Pachter.

The present (truncated) work is a collaborative project between renowned Canadian author Margaret Atwood and Canadian artist Charles Pachter. The Circle Game explores themes of childhood, loss, and the passage of time. The series of poems presents an image of children playing a repetitive game, symbolizing cycles of life, innocence, and inevitable change. While the children appear carefree, the speaker hints at a deeper awareness of how time alters experience; what was once a simple game will eventually become something different, marked by growing awareness and loss. The series of poems also oscillates to the voice of another speaker, a lover in bed, observing and being observed. In describing the speaker, Atwood writes of a "taut curiosity" where a playful quality of childhood is rediscovered in "word-plays, calculated ploys of the body, the witticisms of touch." In a similar way that Atwood describes the children's repetitive "tranced moving" as lacking joy, she inserts distance and anxiety within the intimate space of lovers, unsettling the idea of a once idyllic passion. Pachter contributes a series of illustrations which combine literal interpretation and expressive abstraction to depict the haunting, anxious qualities that lurk behind Atwood's deceptively simple verse. Accompanying, for instance, the stanzas in which the speaker describes being stuck under the scrupulous gaze of her lover is an illustration of a round, nude female body next to a dark, large instrusive face with scrutinizing eyes whose presence dominates the page. Elsewhere, the group of children with their faces abstracted are depicted in an ouroboros-like circle surrounding a large black mass performing their joyless play. Atwood's verse and Pachter's illustrations reinforce each other's tensions, revealing the unease beneath repetition, the scrutiny within closeness, and the inevitability of transformation. Together, they create a work that is both visually and lyrically haunting, inviting readers to reconsider the cycles they inhabit and the ways in which they, too, are observed and changed.

Lecker and David A2. (Inventory #: 41800)