Charlie knew he was already dead now, had to go somewhere, do something, to get his mind off the pain. Charlie went straight, now closer to them his hands covered the mess in his trousers. Shoot him Charlie shoot him. The blood trail he left straight as a knife cut. Getting there getting there. Charlie getting to the arroyo, pitching into Garrett's arms, slobbering his stomach on Garrett's gun belt. Hello Charlie, said Pat quietly.

The fascination with Billy the Kid is more fascinating than the man himself, really, but this is a very good example. I just wish more of it held up like the above quote. The time shifts work really well; the perspective shifts not so much. Also, there are some jarring anachronisms and inaccuracies. (Look, I never said I hadn't been one of the fascinated!) If it had stuck more with the pathos of the thing, I would have really loved this. Still, the poetry is very good. (The library is kicking me out but I'll come back and put a scrap in later.) And as ever, Pat Garrett is the most sympathetic person in any story about Billy the Kid, so it got that right.

THE COLLECTED WORKS OF BILLY THE KID BY MICHAEL ONDAATJE: From the author of The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje, comes one of his first published works, now available in paperback featuring a new afterword by the author: The Collected Works of Billy the Kid.

A short book of only 130-odd pages, it features a collection of stream of consciousness poetry, prose, and photographs surrounding the legend of Billy the Kid. In the afterword Ondaatje discusses how he began collecting pieces about Billy the Kid early on in his career, researching what he could, and writing short pieces of poetry, imagining what Billy the Kid (also known as William Bonney) was actually like. The poetry is written in the style of e e cummings, with short stanzas bursting with description and scenery as the reader sees through Billy the Kid’s eyes.

The book is not your average story with a beginning, middle and end, but more a collection of poetry, prose and photos, almost like a documentary collection, except Ondaatje wrote a lot of the fiction, drawing from his own life experiences and incidents. The Collected Works of Billy the Kid is nevertheless a fascinating read featuring Ondaatje at his best, revealing his skill and power with words, while offering up an interesting albeit unusual history on the legendary outlaw.

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The most violent books I've read are Child of God, A Clockwork Orange, and surprisingly, this book. It's a combination of prose, poetry, and pictures centered around the infamous outlaw Billy the Kid. It's a quick read, only about 100 pages, many of which only have a few short lines of poetry. I've read a good amount of Michael Ondaatje and he certainly doesn't shy away from violence, but it never felt central to his other work so I wasn't expecting the extremely graphic images he writes about in this story. It's a creative sort of violence and rendered in Ondaatje's excellent descriptive hand, which makes it all the more brutal. As I read, I wanted to wrap myself in an impenetrable suit of armor to prevent my body from being desecrated in the ways that the book's characters are.

All three of the books of those violent books I listed in the beginning of the first paragraph are about violence in some way. Both Child of God and A Clockwork Orange talk about violence as a natural instinct that can be probed and manipulated by the rest of society. A violent man can be created or destroyed in those stories, but I don't think The Collected Works sees it that way. Violence is just a fact of life in Ondaatje's rendition of the west. A dying man has a vein extracted from his body by a curious chicken. Another ill fated man inbreeds dogs until they're mutant beasts that devour him one day. Not to say that there isn't men killing men, but the most horrible scenes in this book dealt with animal violence, often prompted by men. Regardless, its all written very casually. Hauntingly relaxed. "get away from me yer stupid chicken," the man says before he dies.

This short book is going to stick with me for a long time, but I don't ever hope to reread it.

I read The Collected Works of Billy the Kid: Left Handed Poems by Canadian writer Michael Ondaatje once before 40+ years ago while at university. I decided to read it once again as one of my reading groups chose poetry as the March genre. I remember enjoying the book those many years ago and wanted to see what I thought now.
The Collected Works is a mix of poetry, vignettes and interviews and pieces from other articles about about Billy the Kid. The focus of this book is the hunting and arrest and ultimate shooting of Billy the Kid (William Bonney) by Pat Garrett. There are some fascinating little stories within the body of the work, some actually very gritty and disturbing. The book flows very nicely and the inset poetry is graphic and descriptive.
The book is a fascinating concept and as before, I found it interesting and easy to read. There are little insights into Bonney and Pat Garrett much of which is learned from incidents at the home of Sallie and John Chisum. You also get a perspective of the life during that time. All in all, I enjoyed as much as the first time. Well worth trying. (4 stars)

I have never read Ondaatje before this, but I was intrigued by the concept of this novel(?). Part prose and part poetry, Ondaatje weaves the life of Billy the Kid, a rugged outlaw of the Wild West, through beautiful imagery and grandeur. As a concept, I think this works really well!

But in practice, I admit I was left wanting. I hesitate to say that this would've been better as a book, but well... I think it would've been better as a book. Not to say the poetry was bad by any means, quite the contrary. But the few prose snippets we got left me wanting more. If this was proper book supplemented by poetry inbetween chapters or something like that, it would've raised this book to a five star for me. But then again, it would lose the novelty of the format.

And the format is important for the themes of the story. Fragmented and incomplete snapshots of Billy the Kid's life and relationships makes it almost feel as if you're reading the tattered and frayed journal of the titular character; context has been lost, but a full picture remains.

Anyways, it's a good read, highly recommended!

I've been meaning to read this ever since I saw The Twenty-One Lives of Billy the Kid, a movie in which Billy is shot twenty-one times by a gunman off screen and talks to a bunch of people around an Eternal Campfire.

It delivers! I liked it very very much. It reminded me in some ways of Richard Brautigan (though Brautigan is much sillier).

Nothing more to add, really.

When I set out to read a group of Westerns, a genre I have had little experience reading, I mostly intended to focus on the pulp fiction, and indeed, most of the books so far that I've ready have fit into that category, but now, for the last few, I'm moving toward reading "high-brow" Westerns, those that intend to be Literature with a capital L. Ondaatje's work certainly fits into that because it's not a Western aiming for a popular audience, with a heavy-handed plot and a likeable character at its center. Rather, it's a book of poetry, with the legendary Western antihero Billy the Kid at its center.

The book, in large part, is a kind of "found poetry," extracts from real-life documents rearranged in a poetic format. Ondaatje aims to describe the final days of Billy from multiple points of view, as his partners are gunned down and he is taken prisoner by and then escapes from his one-time friend and now sherriff Paul Garrett. All this seeps through what narrative is provided, because, this being poetry, we're more focused on the thoughts of the people at any given moment than on what's happening. In that sense, not having read Billy's history, I found the earlygoing parts of the book difficult to follow, but as I read on, I began to understand who was talking when and how events came to be.

As a piece of descriptive and experimental literature (Ondaatje includes various types of prose, rhyming poetry/lyrics, free verse, photographs), the Collected Works works admirably. One gets a pretty good set of views of the young man--from his friend, lovers, enemies, and self--while also coming to see how real-life people enter into myth. It was an enjoyable read, though I can't say that the work made me empathize too much with anyone or made me want to read a ton more about Billy.

This book had an identity crisis.

"The Collected Works of Billy the Kid" is, structurally, a poetry collection that wants to be a novel. In terms of narrative, it is a novel that wants to be a poetry collection. There are some parts written in verse and some parts written in prose. Overall, however, this battle between two identites became the book's biggest down fall. This could have been a GREAT novel in verse, yet it wanted to be more. Also, this isn't a wannabe trying to do something cool, it's MICHAEL FREAKING ONDAATJE! I expected more from him than this identity crisis. However, I do have to say the narrative it tells is very impressive. The poetic language Ondaatje has in this book is also fantastic (some passages blew me away). However, because of the lack of true identity, this book wasn't able to be something truly amazing like I knew Ondaatje was wanting it to be. I would still recommend this, but I would also recommend reading some of his full length novels first. Maybe "The English Patient" or "Warlight" will do the trick.

I am giving this one a 3.5 out of 5 stars.

"I'll be with the world till she dies."

So says William Bonney in Michael Ondaatje's impressionistic, avant-garde novel about the West's most mythologized outlaw.

In this postmodern experiment with poetry, fragmented narrative, and photography, Ondaatje mines the essence, if not the facts, of Billy the Kid, using atmosphere, language, and form.

"A river you could get lost in
and the sun a flashy hawk
on the edge of it"

I felt the book was at its best in the short, stark poems, which illuminate a very particular world. Ondaatje abhors the cliches of Western imagery, and revels in blood, death, and a feral vision of nature. The narrative sections can be dense, tangly bits of writing, difficult to follow on a literal level but potent with atmosphere. Many are narrated by Billy, who is described by Garrett as having an "imagination which was usually pointless and never in control." That unbridled linguistic force is reflected in the writing.

The title of this book seems to have thrown many readers for a loop. Comically, even the library I borrowed it from had it shelved alongside The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, as if this actually represented the sum literary efforts of Billy the Kid.

Instead, Ondaatje has given us the book that Billy should have written. You get the feeling that this is, in fact, how the mind of a gunfighter would express itself--in bursts and fits, sometimes with great eloquence and sometimes with carnal violence. Always on a hair trigger.

Beautiful and crazed. poetry photography and prose build the portrait of Billy.

His best book.

The literary world needs more strange and lovely and violent Westerns.