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Rating(3.9 / 5.0, 92 votes)
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This book was my first step toward my goal of "reading more poetry this year." To be fair, I have not read much poetry since college, but I had mixed feelings about this collection. There are shining moments, particularly when it seems as if Ondaatje is artfully conveying the myths of some faraway land through gorgeous metaphors and symbols (burial, hair, trees). However, there are also times when Ondaatje attempts to build these worlds and instead falls flat.
Inspired by his native Sri Lanka and unafraid of using foreign terms or challenging descriptors, Ondaatje fails to check the box marked "relatable" with this poetry collection. The American reader who has never seen Sri Lanka and is unfamiliar with its customs and history is forced to do a lot of work to understand this world. This is fine, and I don't have the expectation that the poet is going to simply hand me the story. The trouble is that Handwriting's already elaborate world-building is further complicated by the seamless blending of its mythology into its reality. If the poet's job is to convey an image and give a reader perspective, then in some ways, Handwriting leaves me feeling like I'm squinting at vibrant colors through opaque glass.
Ultimately, Ondaatje's largest success in Handwriting is conveying the feeling of the place rather than the place itself.
Inspired by his native Sri Lanka and unafraid of using foreign terms or challenging descriptors, Ondaatje fails to check the box marked "relatable" with this poetry collection. The American reader who has never seen Sri Lanka and is unfamiliar with its customs and history is forced to do a lot of work to understand this world. This is fine, and I don't have the expectation that the poet is going to simply hand me the story. The trouble is that Handwriting's already elaborate world-building is further complicated by the seamless blending of its mythology into its reality. If the poet's job is to convey an image and give a reader perspective, then in some ways, Handwriting leaves me feeling like I'm squinting at vibrant colors through opaque glass.
Ultimately, Ondaatje's largest success in Handwriting is conveying the feeling of the place rather than the place itself.
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I've shared my admiration of this man before, but that won't stop me from saying again and again how absolutely exquisite I think he is. What strikes me about Handwriting is that it is so very personal and what impresses me is that it is even vulnerably so. It's as if he bled on the page for a while. For me, a great deal of bad contemporary poetry lacks that quality. Instead, I find most contemporary poetry is cowardly, the poet or narrator looks out rather than within, and if he or she does attempt to look within, then the language is either empty of soul, bloodless and impersonal, or it's overflowing drivel frothing with obtuse emotion and trite description. So it has been so refreshing for me to read Ondaatje's poems at a time when I was becoming kinda just a tad disillusioned with poetry.
Handwriting is Ondaatje's revisiting of his homeland, Sri Lanka. In these poems he mixes the everyday with myth, the present with past, the real with art, he juxtaposes his childhood memories against his more discerning, more present or perhaps more distant adult eye. I think this is something that he himself is unsure of and testing--what is more true? what he believes today that he saw or experienced then, or what others' tales have told, or what he sees with his own eyes now? And I'm not sure but maybe there is no definitive answer, only that there is truth in all of it. And it is the impressions, the language, the effect not the fact that matters most in the end: "Handwriting occured on waves,/ on leaves, the scripts of smoke"("The Distance of a Shout").
Needless to say, this little volume is a treasure that I will keep and revisit many times.
Handwriting is Ondaatje's revisiting of his homeland, Sri Lanka. In these poems he mixes the everyday with myth, the present with past, the real with art, he juxtaposes his childhood memories against his more discerning, more present or perhaps more distant adult eye. I think this is something that he himself is unsure of and testing--what is more true? what he believes today that he saw or experienced then, or what others' tales have told, or what he sees with his own eyes now? And I'm not sure but maybe there is no definitive answer, only that there is truth in all of it. And it is the impressions, the language, the effect not the fact that matters most in the end: "Handwriting occured on waves,/ on leaves, the scripts of smoke"("The Distance of a Shout").
Needless to say, this little volume is a treasure that I will keep and revisit many times.
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« That great writer, dying, called out
for the fictional doctor in his novels. »
« A gradual acceptance of this new language. »
« Above ground, massacre and race.
A heart silenced.
The tongue removed.
The human body merged into burning tyre.
Mud glaring back
into a stare. »
« But if I had to perish twice ? »
« Ganesh in pink,
in yellow,
in elephant darkness »
«A city with the lap
and spell of a river »
« Once we buried our libraries
under the great medicinal trees
which the invaders bruned
-when we lost the books,
the poems of science, invocations. »
« The poets wrote their stories on rock and leaf
to celebrate the work of the day,
the shadow pleasures of night.
Kanakara, they said.
Tharu piri… »
They slept, famous, in palace courtyards
then hid within forests when they were hunted
for composing the arts of love and science
while there was war to celebrate.
They were revealed in their darknesses
- as if a torch were held above the night sea
exposing the bodies of fish –
and were killed and made more famous. »
« Those whose bodies
could not be found. »
« A woman who journeys to a tryst
having no jewels,
darkness in her hair,
the sky lovely with its stars »
« I hold you the way astronomers
draw constellations for each other
in the markets of wisdom »
« Love arrives and dies in all disguises
and we fear to move
because of old darknesses
or childhood danger »
« Where is there a room
without the damn god of love ? »
« Who abandoned who, I wonder now. »
« under the rain of her hair »
« 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. »
« A red thatch roof to his head more modest than crimson, deeper than blood. »
« Vanity even when we are a corpse. For a blue hand that contains no touch or desire in it for another. »
« 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. »
« Language attacks the paper from the air »
« 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. »
« He bends down and kisses through the skin
the child in the body of his wife.
Both of them in dreams. He lies there,
watched her face as it catches a breath.
He pulls back a wisp across her eye
and bites it off. Braids it
into his own hair, then sleeps beside them.) »
« How desire became devotional
so it held up your house,
your lover’s house, the house of your god. »
« 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 you 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 »
« I want to die on you chest but not yet,
she wrote, sometime in the 13th 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. »
Handwriting – Michael Ondaatje
for the fictional doctor in his novels. »
« A gradual acceptance of this new language. »
« Above ground, massacre and race.
A heart silenced.
The tongue removed.
The human body merged into burning tyre.
Mud glaring back
into a stare. »
« But if I had to perish twice ? »
« Ganesh in pink,
in yellow,
in elephant darkness »
«A city with the lap
and spell of a river »
« Once we buried our libraries
under the great medicinal trees
which the invaders bruned
-when we lost the books,
the poems of science, invocations. »
« The poets wrote their stories on rock and leaf
to celebrate the work of the day,
the shadow pleasures of night.
Kanakara, they said.
Tharu piri… »
They slept, famous, in palace courtyards
then hid within forests when they were hunted
for composing the arts of love and science
while there was war to celebrate.
They were revealed in their darknesses
- as if a torch were held above the night sea
exposing the bodies of fish –
and were killed and made more famous. »
« Those whose bodies
could not be found. »
« A woman who journeys to a tryst
having no jewels,
darkness in her hair,
the sky lovely with its stars »
« I hold you the way astronomers
draw constellations for each other
in the markets of wisdom »
« Love arrives and dies in all disguises
and we fear to move
because of old darknesses
or childhood danger »
« Where is there a room
without the damn god of love ? »
« Who abandoned who, I wonder now. »
« under the rain of her hair »
« 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. »
« A red thatch roof to his head more modest than crimson, deeper than blood. »
« Vanity even when we are a corpse. For a blue hand that contains no touch or desire in it for another. »
« 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. »
« Language attacks the paper from the air »
« 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. »
« He bends down and kisses through the skin
the child in the body of his wife.
Both of them in dreams. He lies there,
watched her face as it catches a breath.
He pulls back a wisp across her eye
and bites it off. Braids it
into his own hair, then sleeps beside them.) »
« How desire became devotional
so it held up your house,
your lover’s house, the house of your god. »
« 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 you 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 »
« I want to die on you chest but not yet,
she wrote, sometime in the 13th 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. »
Handwriting – Michael Ondaatje
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3.5
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I like his other book 'Secular Love' much better.
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A short book of marvelous poetry that transports you though love and loss in verdant Sri Lanka. Wonderful to read.
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The language of these poems is as rich as is Sri Lanka, as is its myths, as is desire that this place evokes. Ondaatje conveys a longing for what was, what is, never complete but purified by myth or memory, what will always be, as Buddha statues are hidden in the jungle. These last lines of the final poem “Last Ink” capture an elusive certainty that moves like a hand writing:
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.
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4.25 ☆. A lot of memorable moments. Will be reading my favorites again.
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I wish I appreciated poetry more...
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Book #2 Read for Asian American and Pacific Islander Month, May 2024.
“Love arrives and dies in all disguises, and we fear to move because of old darknesses or childhood anger” (42).
A haunting and gorgeous poetry collection of the surreal becoming a metaphor for all things lost and gained, a reflection on postcolonial repercussions that served as memories for Mr. Ondaatje, “we depart into worlds that have nothing to do with those we love” (57).
The act of handwriting is a way of process, and emotionally connecting to the past and a hurt present, both tinged with trauma and thought combined, “Handwriting occurred on waves, on leaves, on scripts of smoke, a sign” (6).
It’s vintage Ondaatje. Written with fragmented diction that establishes an unending sadness, the search for love and identity is the hallmark of this masterful collection.
A haunting line sums up “Handwriting”- “who abandoned who, I wonder now” (50).
“Love arrives and dies in all disguises, and we fear to move because of old darknesses or childhood anger” (42).
A haunting and gorgeous poetry collection of the surreal becoming a metaphor for all things lost and gained, a reflection on postcolonial repercussions that served as memories for Mr. Ondaatje, “we depart into worlds that have nothing to do with those we love” (57).
The act of handwriting is a way of process, and emotionally connecting to the past and a hurt present, both tinged with trauma and thought combined, “Handwriting occurred on waves, on leaves, on scripts of smoke, a sign” (6).
It’s vintage Ondaatje. Written with fragmented diction that establishes an unending sadness, the search for love and identity is the hallmark of this masterful collection.
A haunting line sums up “Handwriting”- “who abandoned who, I wonder now” (50).
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Really did not like this book.
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