4 stars - In "Handwriting," Michael Ondaatje strives to fully inhabit his native Sri Lanka through poetry.

I gather that the poems were initiated during a trip to his country of birth from his residence in Toronto, Canada, where he has lived for many years, but the poems convey far more than quick observations. He incorporates myth, history, folk-tale, characters, sounds, sometimes his own experiences, and also, importantly, named places. To me, the latter were especially bewildering until I discovered, using Google Maps, that they are often ancient ruins, sites where I imagine Ondaatje walked or stayed.

He refers to the country's "medieval coast," to times of royalty, scholarship, youthful learning, love, theater, times of peace. To a town buried by a lake; to a village of local wisdom, of stone-cutters, soothsayers, gem diggers, noting that their "wisdom extends no more than thirty miles." To forests that were once water-gardens.

In addition to immersing himself in Sri Lanka's ancient past, the poems seek to resurrect, bring into the present, the island nation's rich and tragic history. Many of the poems tell the story of enemies, invaders, who forced the local monks who guarded and preserved their culture, to carry away Buddhist monuments ("stone and bronze gods") to safer places, sometimes to bury them. For example, a Samadhi Buddha buried in 750 AD was rediscovered only in 1968. Anecdotes about the country's artistic and literary culture are taken from many time periods, giving the sense that cultural flowering and destruction are events that recur over thousands of years.

Evidence of these recurrences takes the form of the Buddhist monuments that were unearthed, by accident, many centuries later. Or they are preserved in language or, more physically, in writing. Ondaatje fuses the creative action of his own poems with the poetry of ancient writings. But ancient poetry is multi-layered, is also calligraphy, decorative, beautiful, meaningful at multiple levels of the human mind.

In "Last Ink," Ondaatje writes, "In certain languages the calligraphy celebrates / where you met the plum blossom and the moon by chance." It continues, "Years later you shared it / on a scroll or nudged / the ink onto stone / to hold the vista of a life."

Yet another layer of Ondaatje's idea or vision of ancient culture with possible links to the natural world and the present, and possibly to himself, appears in a more obscure way (to me, that is) in "The Distance of a Shout," when he refers to "Handwriting occurred on waves, // on leaves, the scripts of smoke, / a sign on the bridge along the Mahaweli River." In "Buried 2, iii," The poets wrote their stories on rock and leaf / to celebrate the work of the day, / the shadow pleasures of night." In "The Great Tree," "Language attacks the paper from the air / There is only a path of blossoms." In "House on a Red Cliff," "the sea is in the leaves / the waves are in the palms / old languages in the arms / of the casuarina pine ...." And from "Last Ink," again, "You cut your desire / against a river stone. / You caught yourself / in a cicada-wing rubbing, / lightly inked. / The indelible darker self."

If these excerpts seem like riddles, I think it is because Ondaatje is trying to convey the shifting and multi-layered qualities of culture, history, creativity, emotions and the self. Perhaps he indicates here a struggle with the limitations of writing in the face of such complexity.

This slender book contains so many unexpected riches.

Death at Kataragama

For half the day blackouts stroke this house into stillness so there is no longer a whirring fan or the hum of light. You hear sounds of a pencil being felt for in a drawer in the dark and then see its thick shadow in candlelight, writing the remaining words. Paragraphs reduced to one word. A punctuation mark. Then another word, complete as a thought. The way someone’s name holds terraces of character, contains all of our adventures together. I walk the corridors which might perhaps, I’m not sure, be cooler than the rest of the house. Heat at noon. Heat in the darkness of night.

There is a woodpecker I am enamoured of I saw this morning through my binoculars. A red thatch roof to his head more modest than crimson, deeper than blood. Distance is always clearer. I no longer see words in focus. As if my soul is a blunt tooth. I bend too close to the page to get nearer to what is being understood. What I write will drift away. I will be able to understand the world only at arm’s length.

Can my soul step into the body of that woodpecker? He may be too hot in sunlight, it could be a limited life. But if this had been offered to me today, at 9 a.m., I would have gone with him, traded this body for his.

A constant fall of leaf around me in this time of no rain like the continual habit of death. Someone soon will say of me, “his body was lying in Kataragama like a pauper.” Vanity even when we are a corpse. For a blue hand that contains no touch or desire in it for another. There is something else. Not just the woodpecker. Ten water buffalo when I stopped the car. They were being veered from side to side under the sun. The sloshing of their hooves in the paddy field that I heard thirty yards away, my car door open for the breeze, the haunting sound I was caught within as if creatures of magnificence were undressing and removing their wings. My head and almost held breath out there for an hour so that later I felt as if I contained that full noon light.

It was water in an earlier life I could not take into my mouth when I was dying. I was soothed then the way a plant would be, brushed with a wet cloth, as I reduced all thought into requests. Take care of this flower. Less light. Curtain. As I lay there prone during the long vigil of my friends. The ache of ribs from too much sleep or fever—bones that protect the heart and breath in battle, during love beside another. Saliva, breath, fluids, the soul. The place bodies meet is the place of escape.

But this time brutal aloneness. The straight stern legs of the woodpecker braced against the jak fruit as he delves for a meal. Will he feel the change in his nature as my soul enters? Will it go darker? Or will I enter as I always do another’s nest, in their clothes and with their rules for a particular life.

Or I could leap into knee-deep mud potent with rice. Ten water buffalo. A quick decision. Not goals considered all our lives but, in the final minutes, sudden choice. This morning it was a woodpecker. A year ago the face of someone on a train. We depart into worlds that have nothing to do with those we love. This woman whose arm I would hold and comfort, that book I wanted to make and shape tight as a stone—I would give everything away for this sound of mud and water, hooves, great wings.

Last Ink

In certain countries aromas pierce the heart and one dies
half waking in the night as an owl and a murderer's cart go by

the way someone in your life will talk out love and grief
then leave your company laughing.

In certain languages the calligraphy celebrates
where you met the plum blossom and moon by chance

—the dusk light, the cloud pattern,
recorded always in your heart

and the rest of the world—chaos,
circling your winter boat.

Night of the Plum and Moon.

Years later you shared it
on a scroll or nudged
the ink onto stone
to hold the vista of a life.

A condensary of time in the mountains
—your rain-swollen gate, a summer
scarce with human meeting.
Just bells from another village.

The memory of a woman walking down stairs.

Life on an ancient leaf
or a crowded 5th-century seal

this mirror-world of art
—lying on it as if a bed.

When you first saw her,
the night of moon and plum,
you could speak of this to no one.
You cut your desire
against a river stone.
You caught yourself
in a cicada-wing rubbing,
lightly inked.
The indelible darker self.

A seal, the Masters said,
must contain bowing and leaping,
"and that which hides in waters."

Yellow, drunk with ink,
the scroll unrolls to the west
a river journey, each story
an owl in the dark, its child-howl

unreachable now
—that father and daughter,
that lover walking naked down blue stairs
each step jarring the humming from her mouth.

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

before the yellow age of paper

before her story became a song,
lost in imprecise reproductions

until caught in jade,

whose spectrum could hold the black greens
the chalk-blue of her eyes in daylight.


Our altering love, our moonless faith.

Last ink in the pen.

My body on this hard bed.

The moment in the heart
where I roam restless, searching
for the thin border of the fence
to break through or leap.

Leaping and bowing.

I was a little disappointed with this spare collection. It's certainly not bad by any stretch, but I prefer his novels.

3 STARS

"Handwriting is Michael Ondaatje's first new book of poetry since The Cinnamon Peeler. The exquisite poems collected here draw on history, mythology, landscape, and personal memories to weave a rich tapestry of images that reveal the longing for--and expose the anguish over--lost loves, homes, and language, as the poet contemplates scents and gestures and evokes a time when "handwriting occurred on waves, / on leaves, the scripts of smoke" and remembers a woman's "laughter with its / intake of breath. Uhh huh." (From Amazon)

Ondaatje is one of the most lyrical writers and anything sounds lovely and fantastical coming from his pen. If you are fan you must read. A great collection of poetry!

Wonderful poems...I have given this book as a gift many times.

This is the first verse I have read by Ondaatje. It is beautiful, but I feel that there is more... Any rate, I look forward to finding more of his work and returning to this one another day.

Authentically cultured in an atmosphere that sways heavy with love, history and a home in the distance, Sri Lanka. Ondaatje welcomes his home in our hearts and offers us a contrast of his feelings in his writing and our individualistic sense of the human experience drawn back from his memory.

In topics ranging from love and loss, politics and religion, landscape and culture, Michael Ondaatje weaves an intricate spider's web of words. And yet, despite the richness of language and image, I had trouble connecting to many of the poems, with two notable exceptions: The Story, a fable of time and preparing for war, and Last Ink that weaves images of love and the act of writing into an intoxicating spell.

For his first forty days a child
is given dreams of previous lives.
Journeys, winding paths,
a hundred small lessons
and then the past is erased.

Some are born screaming,
some full of introspective wandering
into the past - that bus ride in winter,
the sudden arrival within
a new city in the dark.
And those departures from family bonds
leaving what was lost and needed.
So the child's face is a lake
of fast moving clouds and emotions.

A last chance for the clear history of the self.
All our mothers and grandparents here,
our dismantled childhoods
in the buildings of the past.

Some great forty-day daydream
before we bury the maps.

Written in Sri Lanka and Canada, teeming with references to Central Asian myth and places. Very pretty, perfect for a quiet evening.

Mercurial, wild - baffling, brilliant - a near-magic trick, a master at the top of his game.

Sensuous and stunning.