Beautiful, especially the one about scars.

i cant put my emotions about this poetry collection into words. its a masterpiece what else did you expect? ondaatje is one of my favourite poets and the way he plays with words, rhythm, meter, ... is incredible
there is always so much to unpack and think about while reading his poems and you can tell how much time and effort he has put in writing them.
he captures the anxiety of an artist in the best way possible.

are you happy?

No I am not happy

lucky though

9.4/10
Hosting a collection of poems from 1963-1990, Michael Ondaatje’s The Cinnamon Peeler is both audaciously experimental and proficiently clear. It’s a reflecting pool within the span of our entire landscape, placing value in as much of what we see as what we feel.

Of note:

Letters & Other Worlds
White Dwarfs
Tell me all you know about bamboo
Cabin
The distance between us
Her house
The Cinnamon Peeler
Pacific Letters
Escarpment
(The linguistic war between men and women)

Ondaatje is a master of imagery. Even if, like me, you don't always see the structure of poetry and how it affects what you're reading his words and the pictures they paint always feel true. The phrasing about love, so simple in two lines, say more than chapters by other men.

Иноскзательный язык Ондатье витееватыми тропками уводит в мир чувств, красок, желаний, ощущений

collection of poems over a 27yr period, tho not sure if in chronological order. love his choice of repetitious imagery. some of my faves-- "to a sad daughter," "translations of my postcards," and "the agatha christie books by the window." and of course the title poem!

smell my skin - I am the cinnamon peeler's wife

This midnight breathing
heaves with no sensible rhythm,
is fashioned by no metronome.
Your body, eager
for the extra yard of bed,
reconnoitres and outflanks;
I bend in peculiar angles.

This nightly battle is fought with subtleties:
you get pregnant, I'm sure,
just for extra ground
- immune from kicks now.

Inside you now's another,
thrashing like a fish,
swinging, fighting
for its inch already.

- A House Divided, pg. 7

* * *

Two birds loved
in a flurry of red feather
like a burst cottonball,
continuing while I drove over them.

I am a good driver, nothing shocks me.

- Application for a Driving Licence, pg. 14

* * *

I'm holding my son in my arms
sweating after nightmares
small me
fingers in his mouth
his other fist clenched in my hair
small me
sweating after nightmares.

- Griffin of the Night, pg. 31

* * *

At night the most private of a dog's long body groan.
It comes with his last stretch
in the dark corridor outside our room.
The children turn.
A window tries to split with cold
the other dog hoofing the carpet for lice.
We're all alone.

- Birth of Sound, pg. 32

* * *

It is the formal need
to suck blossoms out of the flesh
in those we admire
planting them private in the brain
and cause fruit in lonely gardens.

To learn to pour the exact arc
of steel still soft and crazy
before it hits the page.
I have stroked the mood and tone
of hundred year dead men and women
Emily Dickinson's large dog, Conrad's beard
and, for myself,
removed them from historical traffic.
Having tasted their brain. Or heard
the wet sound of a death cough.
Their idea of the immaculate moment is now.

The rumours pass on
the rumours pass on
are planted
till they become a spine.

- Taking, pg. 41

* * *

In the long open Vancouver Island room
sitting by the indoor avocados
where indoor spring light
falls on the half covered bulbs

and down the long room light falling
onto the dwarf orange tree
vines from south america
the agatha christie book by the window

Nameless morning
solution of grain and colour

There is this light,
colourless, which falls on the warm
stretching brain of the bulb
that is dreaming avocado

- The Agatha Christie Books by the Window, pg. 51

* * *

Tell me
all you know
about bamboo

growing wild, green
growing up into soft arches
in the temple ground

the traditions

driven through hands
through the heart
during torture

and most of all

this

small bamboo pipe
not quite horizontal
that drips
every ten seconds
to a shallow bowl

I love this
being here
not a word
just the faint
fall of liquid
the boom of an iron buddhist bell
in the heart rapid
as ceremonial bamboo

- Tin Roof, pg. 106

* * *

Night and its forces
step through the picket gate
from the blue bush
to the kitchen

Everywhere it moves
and we cannot sleep we cannot sleep
we damn the missionaries
their morals thin as stars
we find ourselves
within the black
circus of the fly
all night long
his sandpaper
tabasco leg

The dog sleepwalks
into the cupboard
into the garden and heart attacks
hello
I've had a dog dream
wake up and cannot find
my long ears

Nicotine caffeine
hungry bodies
could put us to sleep
but nothing puts us to sleep

- Rock Bottom, pg. 130

* * *

Kissing the stomach
kissing your scarred
skin boat. History
is what you've travelled on
and take with you

We've each had our stomachs
kissed by strangers
to the other

and as for me
I bless everyone
who kissed you here

- Rock Bottom, pg. 151

* * *

If I were a cinnamon peeler
I would ride your bed
and leave the yellow bark dust
on your pillow.

Your breasts and shoulders would reek
you could never walk through markets
without the profession of my fingers
floating over you. The blind would
stumble certain of whom they approached
though you might bathe
under rain gutters, monsoon.

Here on the upper thigh
at this smooth pasture
neighbour to your hair
or the crease
that cuts your back. This ankle.
You will be known among strangers
as the cinnamon peeler's wife.

I could hardly glance at you
before marriage
never touch you
- your keen nosed mother, your rough brothers.
I buried my hands
in saffron, disguised them
over smoking tar,
helped the honey gatherers . . .

When we swam once
I touched you in water
and our bodies remained free,
you could hold me and be blind of smell.
You climbed the bank and said

this is how you touch other women
the grass cutter's wife, the lime burner's daughter.
And you searched your arms
for the missing perfume

and knew

what good is it
to be the lime burner's daughter
left with no trace
as if not spoken to in the act of love
as if wounded without the pleasure of a scar.

You touched
your belly to my hands
in the dry air and said
I am the cinnamon
peeler's wife. Smell me.

- The Cinnamon Peeler, pg. 156-157

* * *

the peacock means order
the fighting kangaroos mean madness
the oasis means I have struck water

positioning of the stamp - the despot's head
horizontal, or 'mounted policemen'
mean political danger

the false date means I
am not where I should be

when I speak of the weather
I mean business

a blank postcard says
I am in the wilderness

- Translations of My Postcards, pg. 170

I admit it, if not for the film The English Patient, I likely wouldn't have read Michael Ondaatje's fiction, his nonfiction or his poetry. To have missed this book, I think, would have left me sad without quite knowing why.

Thirty years after my former beloved partner gave this to me for Christmas, I rediscovered it on my shelf, opened it and was smitten anew.

I first visited the title poem, one of my long-time favourites, surely the most erotic verse I have ever read. How I long for the smell of cinnamon on my own flesh.

But then I retraced my fingers back to the start, checking off nearly every poem as one worth re-reading, in particular: "Letters and Other Worlds"; many of those contained in Rock bottom, particularly *('The space in which we have dissolved -- does it taste of us?') and *(Saturday) and *(Ends of the Earth) -- which touched my itinerant soul to the core.
And then two fantastic forays into nature near the end: Escarpment and Birch Bark.

I will visit again before the next thirty years has passed.

I didn't love every poem in this collection, but the ones I liked, I liked enough to copy down and save for later. Ondaatje is at his best, for me, when he writes about relationships of any kind. The poem about Chris Dewdney is the one I remember best a few weeks later.