Back to his roots

After celebrated novels such as The English Patient and Anil’s Ghost or redolent memoirs such as Running in the Family, Michael Ondaatje’s readers might be forgiven for forgetting that he has always been a poet first and last.

A Year of Last Things, Ondaatje’s first book of poems since Handwriting (1998), will put paid to that temporary forgetfulness. More, it might remind us that in Ondaatje’s imaginative world, the usual stolid distinctions between prose and poetry, between fiction and memoir and autobiography, and among several manifestations of time — time remembered, time forgotten, time written or rewritten; the past invoked as both distant and resonantly present — are quietly dissolved in his loving craft.

Divided into five sections, the 33 poems in A Year of Last Things are intimately partnered with five prose pieces to form a whole that might be thought of collectively as a homage to “last things:” much of the writing is suffused with a beautifully elegiac tone as Ondaatje reflects on moments with lost friends, lost rivers, lost time, lost family pets. Always, an innumerable host of artists and their art attend as Ondaatje traverses wide geographies of space and time, of continents and eras, to summon up moments remembered and commemorated.

The usual Ondaatje familiars abound — film and music, maps and photographs, violence — often settling into erotic invocations of lovers remembered, lovers recovered or lost. And woven into this writing, most often in the brilliant prose pieces, are embedded reflections on Ondaatje’s own writing, which he sometimes quotes (and misquotes) to wonderful effect.

The most striking prose passage is Winchester House, the longest of the book at over 12 pages. Here, abetted by a photograph, Ondaatje reweaves his memory of a boarding school he attended as a child in Sri Lanka that was overseen by a prototypically cruel priest; friends from childhood resurface to float in a present always pulled pastward and then back to the present as he contemplates the passage of time.

He closes with a typical Ondaatje moment: his friend Senake, another Winchester House inmate, is visiting the priest, now old and widowed; he is awoken by “crying. The old man weeping. Senake got up, walked into Barnabas’s bedroom and saw the old priest beating the dog.”

In the book’s second poem, Definition, many of this collection’s touchstones appear. There’s the apprehension of language in various incarnations — here, in “the plotless thirteen hundred / pages of a Sanskrit dictionary / with its verbs for holy obsessions.” Words are further inflected by “the way dictionaries / speak over mountains,” so that they become a geography.

The poem names various occupations, inviting us to look through a window onto a different world of words:

The precisely named odour of a man

who is a heart-thief

a word for the highest complication

during a play used also for impregnation

Attributes of character

link themselves to professions

— a metal worker, the river merchant,

the Commissioner of Oaths,

the census taker of birds who

continues the ancient art of whistling,

those who carry bees on their arm

like a dark flame.

All of these “definitions,” these “ancient phrases,” convey “the coin of escape,” leading to the poem’s closing invocation, so that scrolling through Sanskrit becomes a road sign towards love lost and love remembered:

This is how deep I was lost,

my darling, in a love so narcotic

I possessed unimpaired splendour

having no other want or wish

What was there before

there was the warmth of that word

for your shoulder blade,

or that time before we moved

to a freedom from desire?

One magical element of this book is that it is everywhere eminently quotable, always a very good sign. Another is the book’s range; you can return to the epigraph from Marguerite Duras and approve it on your pulse: “Writing isn’t just telling stories …. It’s telling everything all at once.”

Another very good emanation is that taken together, the poems call up an image arising in memory from over 40 years ago. In the early summer of 1983, the Learneds — then, as now, Canada’s biggest annual academic conference — was housed in Vancouver at the University of British Columbia. Michael Ondaatje was one of the featured readers in an evening of poetry. His most recent book was the novel Coming Through Slaughter, about the famed New Orleans jazz musician Buddy Bolden, gone mad during a parade.

Ondaatje stood on the stage and conjured music and musicians, summoning them and their instruments, their sounds, into presence. His large audience was rapt. It was as if he were another cinnamon peeler, or a Commissioner of Oaths, or a beekeeper “with bees on his arms / like a dark flame.”

Spoken or on the page, Ondaatje’s poems create wholly enchanting magic, ever alive — even in, perhaps especially in, A Year of Last Things.

Neil Besner taught Canadian literature at the University of Winnipeg for 30 years.