The writer’s first collection of poetry in more than 25 years replaces the idea of ageing as diminution with a blazing and sensual testament to what is held close.
, a man approaches the end of his life. All he wants to carry in his pocket when he dies is “torn-free stanzas / and the telephone numbers / of his children in far cities”. These “torn lines” can “remind us / how to recall”. reflects on late light, long love and a treasury of reading.
To imagine Ondaatje’s virtuosic capacity as the ability to leap between poetry and fiction is to ignore the way his poems are often novelistic, his prose poetic, and his writing often formally hybrid. His novels have a poem’s logic, with patterns and images recurring, rhyme-like, and an order described in the novelshuffles memoir, anecdotes, photos and poems as Ondaatje returns to his birthplace Sri Lanka to explore family myths and silences.
of jazz musician Buddy Bolden – “we thought he was formless, but I think now he was tormented by order” – evokes Ondaatje’s own method. The beautiful looseness and capaciousness of these poems recall a jazz musician playing outside. Free verse lines meander and snap, narrative buoys a poem’s music like melody and poems move between keys with a “breaking line’s breath-like leap”.says, quoting Stendhal, travelling and reflection are important to Ondaatje’s poems, too.
Ondaatje’s poems continue to sing and light, like the woman in her “year of last things” who is “luminous within those final fires”.
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