The+City+Planners

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** The City Planners ** ** Margaret Atwood ** The Poem Cruising these residential Sunday streets in dry August sunlight: what offends us is the sanities: the houses in pedantic rows, the planted sanitary trees, assert levelness of surface like a rebuke to the dent in our car door. No shouting here, or shatter of glass; nothing more abrupt than the rational whine of a power mower cutting a straight swath in the discouraged grass.

But though the driveways neatly sidestep hysteria by being even, the roofs all display the same slant of avoidance to the hot sky, certain things: the smell of spilled oil a faint sickness lingering in the garages, a splash of paint on brick surprising as a bruise, a plastic hose poised in a vicious coil; even the too-fixed stare of the wide windows

give momentary access to the landscape behind or under the future cracks in the plaster

when the houses, capsized, will slide obliquely into the clay seas, gradual as glaciers that right now nobody notices.

That is where the City Planners with the insane faces of political conspirators are scattered over unsurveyed territories, concealed from each other, each in his own private blizzard;

guessing directions, they sketch transitory lines rigid as wooden borders on a wall in the white vanishing air

tracing the panic of suburb order in a bland madness of snows.

Have a look at the following 5 images and note down the words that come to your mind when you first see them? **Questions for consideration** Examine the descriptions of the ‘residential Sunday streets’ (lines 1-15). What is Atwood suggesting through such phrases?
 * Introductory Activity**

Who or what is missing from these streets? What purpose might Atwood have in such omissions?

Now look at the description of contrast between the superficial / artificial ‘face’ of the houses, and what lies beneath (lines 15-28). What is Atwood suggesting through such contrast?

Have a close look at the final few lines of the poem. What is Atwood’s opinion of the City Planners? Why do you think this is?

How would you characterise the tone of the poem? Give reasons for your answer.

Look at the shape of the poem on the page. What do you notice? What might be the reasons for this?

How does this poem compare and contrast with Boey Kim Cheng's //The Planners//?

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