A Year of Last Things

Starred review from January 15, 2024
The dazzling latest by Ondaatje (The Story) brings his formidable literary gifts and imagination to bear on questions of memory and artistic process. Tenderly plumbing friends, ex-lovers, works of art, and “echoing rivers where we lost and found ourselves,” he writes of “all those small recalls of this and that/ before our walk up a staircase into the dark.” Photographs serve as especially potent aides-mémoires, and retrospection is more playful than onerous, even when recollected moments retain their dangerous charge (like “that abandoned time” in boarding school under the reign of an abusive priest, “his large body belted with a Christian cord of rope”). Each experience exists “not as memory, but like a gift/ from forgetfulness.” “Nothing stays still in a story,” Ondaatje reminds the reader, and, indeed, the narrative impulse holds sway in these lyric poems: “your bare feet on a mosaic in Gaza that could perhaps guide you like a terza rima towards a safe place to complete your story.” Poetry offers a place “beyond the familiar properties”: “the breaking line’s breath-like leap/ into the missed life// till there was no longer a story, only stillness/ or falling.” Speaking from and into times of extraordinary loss, the speaker asks: “Now we are less. How do we become more?” This collection radiates the joy of a fully realized, literary life.

Starred review from February 1, 2024

There is something familiar and comforting in Ondaatje's poems, a kind of common sense that calls to the reader and invites them to consider when and where they might have seen, or felt, or feared anything like the poems describe. This is Booker Prize winner Ondaatje's 12th volume of poetry, though he is best known for novels like The English Patient. The verses are rich in imagery, yet quiet and contemplative in their observations. Nothing feels forced or imposed; always the poems feel like invitations to contemplate the moment, the truth, the magic of the actual. Ondaatje has a gift for drawing the mythic and the immediate together into a momentary memory of everything caught in the flickering glow of what might have been. VERDICT A powerful, thoughtful collection of observations and contemplations; a beautiful and valuable addition to the world of poetry by one of its most inspiring writers. Readers who love the work of W.S. Merwin, Mary Oliver, Billy Collins, and Louise Gluck will want to savor this new collection.--Herman Sutter

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