Ondaatje speaks about his fascination with history, which he examines with forensic-like analysis in A Year of Last Things. In the poem, Wanderer, Ondaatje remembers the fate of a friend’s family in Warsaw during the Second World War. They were kept alive, the author tells us, by a German deserter “who roamed Europe like Odysseus”.

In A Night Radio Station in Koprivshtitsa, the poet finds himself in a Bulgarian church bathed in sunlight, staring at candles and statues, awed by centuries of history, where the mythical and the mystical constantly overlap. In A Bus To Fez, we read about a road trip Ondaatje took through North Africa during the 1960s.

“I travelled through Morocco, which I didn’t really like, and then overland to Tunisia and Egypt, where I eventually flew to Sri Lanka,” Ondaatje recalls. “It was a very difficult journey. But some of the memories from that trip, especially my experience in Tunisia, later appeared as images in The English Patient (1992).”

The literary mystery romance novel is set in a bombed-out Italian villa-makeshift hospital during the final days of the Second World War. There we meet four protagonists who are dealing with their own respective war-scarred mental traumas. Among them is a man slowly dying of burns he received in a plane crash in the Sahara Desert. “For about 100 pages in this novel we have this patient who is sitting there practically saying nothing,” says Ondaatje, “I remember writing this, and I was almost waiting for him to say something. Then, when I eventually found his voice, I realised this was a very [unique] version of history.”

The novel was declared the joint winner of the Booker Prize in 1992, and in 2018 it was awarded The Golden Man Booker. The film adaptation of The English Patient starring Kristin Scott Thomas and Ralph Fiennes, and directed by Anthony Minghella, won nine Oscars at the Academy Awards in 1997, including best picture.

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Ondaatje’s latest poems pay tribute to some of his favourite filmmakers. They include Lindsay Anderson, Akira Kurosawa, Ariane Mnouchkine, Chris Marker, and Walter Murch. Ondaatje first met Murch when the latter was editing The English Patient. They subsequently became close friends.

At the turn of the millennium, Ondaatje was watching Murch editing Apocalypse Now Redux (2001) — an extended version of Francis Ford Coppola’s epic 1979 war film. Witnessing Murch at work led to a series of insightful conversations about the art of filmmaking, specifically about the editing process.
Ondaatje convinced Murch to co-operate for a cultural project (a series of informal interviews) that resulted in The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film (2008).

“With that book I did with Walter Murch, I learnt so much about the process of editing,” Ondaatje says. “Writing poetry is quite similar to working on film, where you can just change everything, in terms of tone, pacing, colour or look, by editing a scene. That is why I love the art of rewriting.”

Over the past three years, Ondaatje has written only poetry. Taking a long break from fiction has given him a new sense of artistic freedom, he says: “There is a quick pace and a swerve in poetry that you don’t find in a lot of fiction.”

But what about the audience for poetry? Presumably it’s smaller than for his fiction? “Actually, what I have been discovering is that a lot more people are reading poetry today than they were during the time of, say, T.S. Eliot,” he says. “This book probably won’t have the same level of success as The English Patient,” Ondaatje concludes, “but as a poet you should never be working towards something you already know.”

A Year of Last Things is published by Jonathan Cape at $34.

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