A Year of Last Things

With A Year of Last Things, acclaimed Booker Prize-winning novelist Michael Ondaatje returns to poetry, where he began his career, over fifty years ago, and what a return it is. Born in Sri Lanka during the Second World War, Ondaatje was sent alone to boarding school in London, and then escaped to Canada. Though he has lived there ever since, travel was set in his blood, and these poems reflect the life of a writer, traveller and watcher of the world. He has never conformed to Western traditions – always describing himself as a ‘mongrel’, someone who was born out of a truly diverse society. This is a brave and extraordinary book, looking back on a life of displacement and discovery, love and loss. At first sight it is a glittering collection of fragments, moments and memories – but small, beautiful pieces of life are precisely what matter most to Ondaatje. They make an emotional history. As he writes in the opening poem: ‘Reading the lines he loves / he slips them into a pocket, / wishes to die with his clothes / full of tornfree stanzas / and the telephone numbers / of his children in far cities’. Poetry – where language is made to work hardest, and burns with a gem-like flame – is what Ondaatje has returned to, and this is both an intimate personal record and a great artist’s guide to beauty.