The way someone you know
might lean forward
and mark the place
where your soul is
-always, they say,
near to a wound

A lovely reminder for the need to keep in touch with our own human capabilities and sensuality in the wake of technology. I loved The English Patient and didn't know Ondaatje also wrote poetry. He's wonderful with both genres.

Handwriting (poems) by Michael Ondaatje

A poetry book that is short in size and converges the vast thoughts and ideas to a few words. By reading the verses a reader delves into different surroundings and specific events that begin to form a special sense of the situation.

The poems cover the topics like history, myth and specially love that arouse the feelings of the reader who feels himself present there and being described in the lines.

It was my first experience of reading English poetry book and I feel like the poet has not disappointed me.

I love this collection and each time I reread it, I feel like I am reading it for the first time ever. I sit and savor each word, like I would sit and savor each sip of a cup of strong black tea.

Death at Kataragama

continuing on my journey into reading poetry again. I have loved Ondaatje's novels, so this seemed a safe bet - and I was right. Lovely stuff here.

Although I am reading poetry, I do not feel able to say anything more ABOUT the poetry than "I liked it" or "eh, didn't really connect with that". Sometimes (Mary Oliver) I can say "holy crap, I LOVE THAT".

This is in the "I liked it" category, which is a good thing.

as inevitably brilliant as always... eloquent, pointedly brief, inexplicably descriptive and moving... beautiful in all the ways beauty cannot rightly be expressed and in all the ways it perhaps sometimes shouldn't...

Whisper-light poetry. Until...

"Your powdered anus"

If I could actually give this book zero stars, I would. I hated it. What's the purpose of stringing together images that only a certain group of people would get? I mean, I get that poetry is for the poet and for nobody else. But why publish this atrocity, expecting people to understand. We want to be let in, I googled almost everything for some background. All I got was a poet/speaker who is unsure of himself and his ability as a poet.

I can write better than this crap. I might have an ego, but srsly. FOR REALZ.

One of the few books I kept from my grandpa, I understand why he had this on his nightstand.

How glorious is the feeling of reading poetry about your own people? How magical is it, to find the everyday life you see, the life you lived and the ancient stories that your pious aunts and superstitious much older cousin raised you on, being taken to prose, given metre and romanticised like a sheer blue sapphire?

It's probably not a big deal for people who have a lot of poetry written about their country that is accessible to them, but it's like a gold mine for me, a Sri Lankan who can't read my mother tongues.

I first read Michael Ondaatje in his kind of autobiography Running in the Family and was delighted to find that he a 77-year-old man had grown up with a family of similar, larger-than-life, characters from a stop-motion cartoon as I, 45 years his junior.

The poetry in this, his first collection, is perhaps less glamorous compared to his later collection The Cinnamon Peeler. Maybe he wasn't as famous back when this came out. Maybe he wasn't caught up to purpling his prose yet. And as such, I find this collection very dear to my heart, hence the essay.

Here are some of my favourite lines:

"I want to die on your chest but not yet,
she wrote, sometime in the 13th century of our love."

"Where is the forest
not cut down
for profit or literature"

"the way someone you know
might lean forward
and mark the place
where your soul is."

"Once we buried our libraries
under the great medicinal trees
which the invaders burned
- when we lost the books,
the poems of science, invocations."

I want to die on your chest but not yet,
she wrote, sometime in the thirteenth century
of our love

before the yellow age of paper

before her story became a song,
lost in imprecise reproductions