Publisher's Weekly Review
The dazzling latest by Ondaatje (The Story) brings his formidable literary gifts and imagination to bear on questions of memory and artistic process. Tenderly plumbing friends, ex-lovers, works of art, and "echoing rivers where we lost and found ourselves," he writes of "all those small recalls of this and that/ before our walk up a staircase into the dark." Photographs serve as especially potent aides-mémoires, and retrospection is more playful than onerous, even when recollected moments retain their dangerous charge (like "that abandoned time" in boarding school under the reign of an abusive priest, "his large body belted with a Christian cord of rope"). Each experience exists "not as memory, but like a gift/ from forgetfulness." "Nothing stays still in a story," Ondaatje reminds the reader, and, indeed, the narrative impulse holds sway in these lyric poems: "your bare feet on a mosaic in Gaza that could perhaps guide you like a terza rima towards a safe place to complete your story." Poetry offers a place "beyond the familiar properties": "the breaking line's breath-like leap/ into the missed life// till there was no longer a story, only stillness/ or falling." Speaking from and into times of extraordinary loss, the speaker asks: "Now we are less. How do we become more?" This collection radiates the joy of a fully realized, literary life. (Mar.)
Guardian Review
Michael Ondaatje has always been a poet - it is how he began his career 50 years ago - although he is more famous as a novelist and especially for his 1992 Booker prize-winning The English Patient (which also won the Golden Man Booker in 2018). In A Year of Last Things, he is writing about last - and lost - things. He is not interested in the known quantity, has always been more at home with the unknown, and is extraordinarily attuned to hauntings, to the idea that missing pieces are likely to inform whatever remains. The opening poem, Lock, begins: Reading the lines he loves he slips them into a pocket, wishes to die with his clothes full of torn-free stanzas In the cherishing of "torn-free stanzas" one recognises the romance of the incomplete. Lock is followed by Definition, a generous poem where each word offers something new: All afternoon I stroll the plotless thirteen hundred pages of a Sanskrit dictionary with its verbs for holy obsessions, the name for an alcove of coin washers whose fingers glint all night with dark lead, grains of silver The Sanskrit language becomes coinage and Ondaatje turns up gold. There is an exhilaration in the using of a dictionary not to find the word for something you already knew but to open the door on something you didn't. Of Tamil, Sinhalese and Dutch descent, Ondaatje, who has lived for most of his life in Canada, has always been a traveller, but in this poem, language is his means of transport. Exoticism is underpinned by surprise, a revelling in joyous juxtaposition, in unexpected focusing - as on the person whose occupation might seem a novelty: "the census taker of birds". Ondaatje is a connoisseur - and creator - of atmospheres. This valedictory collection brims with rivers - rivers not so much like Lethe as ones that remember. At their best, his poems take you into an elsewhere, although his taste for the mysterious occasionally seems too much of a default position. Keats might have been right that unheard melodies are sweetest, but there are too many quick enigmas here: "the notes of an unknown bird" or "some unread letter, written long ago", from Mask. He has always been fascinated by maps (like the boy in his beautiful novel Warlight). This collection returns to maps - and maplessness. In The Geography Sixth, he writes about "dutiful maps of pilgrimages". In Bruise, "the maps he relies on have worn out". In The Great Impermanence: "In earlier centuries we were guided/ by few travel maps for the heart." How do we navigate the past? Photographs are considered in a manner recalling WG Sebald, and Ondaatje includes a benign poem on a lover's past (a subject to which Julian Barnes devoted an entire jealous novel). In The Then, Ondaatje writes: A strange awakening thought at 7am to erase this life, and desire what I might have known in photographs of you before we met His poems about the loss of his dog and cat are wonderful too - dignified and unsentimental. We only learn Stella is a dog seven lines in, and the anecdotal then shifts gear with a quickening of grief in its final question. But it is to the tremendous riddle A Bus to Fez that I keep returning. He describes a female companion on the bus and in life: "¿her quiet/ hand on my sleeve warning me of a flame". But is she altogether imagined as stated? She appears to be her own person and might be part of him or might be no one. She might be the love of his life. Stella by Michael Ondaatje This morning before daybreak a thunderstorm In the last hours before her death her enemies came. A raccoon, that storm, the FedEx truck manned by a gentle woman who'd recently lost her own dog. Considering the woman who was usually her enemy our dog perhaps read the grief in her, just as, the night before, a raccoon along the fence backlit by moonlight watched our dog drink noisily from the fountain, her thin body so thirsty! never sensing the creature who continued along the fence and disappeared So many things to learn, keep on learning during these last days, watching us with an awareness that we perhaps have not learned but shall Now we are less. How do we become more? How to die courteous and beautiful protecting her house, guarding our door
Library Journal Review
Booker Prize-winning poet, novelist, and essayist Ondaatje's latest, much-anticipated poetry collection (following his novel Warlight and his 2006 poetry collection The Story) allows listeners to glimpse the influences, inspirations, and experiences that shaped his life. With gemlike imagery, Ondaatje explores the shifting nature of memory and history with language that is at turns wry, questioning, and poignant. Ondaatje details the pleasures and sorrows of his life, whether they are ephemeral flashes or lasting experiences, drawing from past moments while referencing present happenings and telling stories of his travels and encounters across the globe. Narrating his own work, Ondaatje offers a fluid and gentle reading, tenderly guiding listeners through his journey of romance and self-discovery. The result is an intimate listen that feels like whispers shared in the dark. It is occasionally difficult to discern chapter breaks, but as the verses flow, understanding the movement of the writing becomes effortless. VERDICT A mesmerizing audio, enhanced by the author's heartfelt narration. Recommended for listeners hoping to immerse themselves in a poetic escape that is beautifully written and raw.--Autumn Wyatt
