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.

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 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.