Handwriting
Michael Ondaatje
The poems in Handwriting are memories of Sri Lanka: the rituals and traditions, history and geography, the smells and tastes and colours of his first home. Here are sunless forests, cattle-bells, stilt-walkers 'with the movement of prehistoric birds'; a Buddha buried 'so roots/like fingers of a blind monk/spread for two hundred years over his face'; 'saffron and panic seed, lotus flowers, sandalwood; a lover, who lay her fearless heart/light as a barn owl/against him all night'.
Handwriting is an elegy for lost childhood, for a culture and language lost to the turmoil of history, but it is also a glimpse of the source of the writer's delicate, erotic, mysterious imagination. By focussing on writing frankly about beautiful things, Ondaatje takes the poems beyond narrative to these simple, deeply sensual images - given to us in a language that is pared, cursive and exquisite.
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About Michael Ondaatje
Reviews for Handwriting
Independent on Sunday
Handwriting explores Sri Lankan history, geography, ceremonies and myths. It is crowded with scintillating images, such as a tightrope-walker caught in a power cut, beautiful colours and textures
New Statesman
Michael Ondaatje defies the normal distinction between poet and novelist. His writing is consistently tuned to a visionary pitch
Graham Swift Ondaatje's poems are a joy, as all his writing is. The wonderful twists, painful and funny; the utterly individual touch and sumptuous wealth of language; they're all familiar, but as one would expect, they seem to keep getting better, more assured and sometimes more crazy
W. S. Merwin His poems read with the same whimsical precision and authority one finds in Ondaatje's prose. He is the most sensibly ironic writer I've read in years, and the most generously disposed. Would that all worlds were this deftly attended
Robert Creeley A breathtaking collection... If you're going to buy one book this year, buy this one. Ten years from now you'll still be reading it with pleasure
Sam Solecki
Books in Canada
The final poem, "Last Ink," explains why the need to preserve human experience through art is as instinctive as the desire to die in a lover's arms. Dealing with large-scale emotions and scenes of love and war, these are poems that strike to the heart
Martha Silano