By Felicity Plunkett
POETRY
A Year of Last Things
Michael Ondaatje
Jonathan Cape, $34
In Lock, the first poem in A Year of Last Things, 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”.
Michael Ondaatje’s first poetry collection since Handwriting (1998) reflects on late light, long love and a treasury of reading. The poems are not without melancholy, but this is entwined with awareness of the rich accumulation of experience, replacing the conventional idea of ageing as diminution with a blazing and sensual testament to what is held close.
How much of the material in Michael Ondaatje’s poems is non-fictional is unclear.Credit: Getty
Ondaatje’s first published work was poetry, and he has since written fiction, poetry and non-fiction. The English Patient (1992) became his best-known work when it won the Booker Prize and was made into an Oscar-winning film by Anthony Minghella. At 80, he has published a collection that sways between poetry and prose the way much of his work has.
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 novel In the Skin of a Lion as “very faint, very human”. Running in the Family shuffles memoir, anecdotes, photos and poems as Ondaatje returns to his birthplace Sri Lanka to explore family myths and silences.
A Year of Last Things by Michael Ondaatje.
A character’s description in his 1976 novel Coming Through Slaughter 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”.
If a novel is “a mirror walking down a road”, as Hana in The English Patient says, quoting Stendhal, travelling and reflection are important to Ondaatje’s poems, too.
A Bus to Fez compresses the history of friendship between a man and woman. She “had often talked me out of things – a change in life, a foolishness”, but equilibrium is found in mutual reserve: “the two of us loved privacy, / had never shared the solitude within ourselves”. She believes “gentleness implied suffering” thinking of a woman “involved with one man for most of her life”. The man, if it is the same poetic avatar who moves through these poems, has loved one woman for decades, so the comment is barbed. She imagines the two friends discovering each other, “wildly” in a hotel bed somewhere. Not just anywhere, either – in Carthage. She rises from her own fantasy as Dido, making of her companion a kind of Aeneas, who will never give her what she wants.
How much of this is non-fictional is unclear. While Ondaatje’s poetry is phrased in spare and intimate language and entirely lacking in a sense of performance or confection, it is always porous so a figure longing to “slip into the wet dark / rectangle and swim on / barefoot to other depths” (Lock) or another remembering driving at night with a lover, “tense with sudden geography” (Nights When I Drove) could be any of us.
These memories of love recall the love poems in The Cinnamon Peeler, only now the pair have been together for decades, and “he remembers her there by that nameless river, long after, still envious of himself at the time” (Talking in a River).
Pico Iyer finds in Ondaatje’s work “the sensation of a deeply curious traveller opening out his worn suitcase”, letting everything he’s collected “tumble out”. Here, the themes that tumble out are bodies of water, maps, reckless and long-held love. Poring over beloved artworks, Ondaatje writes of Bashõ’s lark singing, who “seems to have had / Not quite his fill”, artists working at night in the dark, and the past becoming “an undiscovered country”.
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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