Handwriting: Poems - Hardcover

Ondaatje, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375405593 ISBN 13: 9780375405594

Publisher: Alfred a Knopf Inc, 1999

Synopsis

From the best-selling author of The English Patient, In the Skin of a Lion, and Running in the Family comes a new collection of magical, witty, and inspired poetry. 15,000 first printing.

About this title

Review:

Sumptuous, steamy, downright sexy: on the blush-o-meter Ondaatje scores a 10. Those who can't get enough of his melodious prose--most notably in The English Patient, which earned him a Booker in 1992--will find the same lyrical genius in his verse. In this collection Ondaatje transports us to his childhood home of Sri Lanka. With strikingly sensuous imagery, he conjures a land of bangles, cattle bells, stilt-walkers and a 1000- year-old buddha "buried in Anuradhapura earth, eyes half closed, hands / in a gesture of meditation...roots / like the fingers of a blind monk / spread for two hundred years over his face." As the title suggests, Handwriting is an elegaic tribute to the ancients who in "wild cursive scripts...spent all their years / writing one good book" only to be killed for toasting "the work of the day / the shadow pleasures of night...while there was war to celebrate." In his Sanskrit and Tamil love poem, "The Nine Sentiments," Ondaatje not only proves most definitively that music is the key to unlocking a reader's heart, but also argues for the healing powers of poetry in times of strife:

The brush of sandalwood along a collarbone
Green dark silk
A shoe left
on the cadju tree terrace
these nights when 'pools are
reduced by constant plungings'
Meanwhile a man's burning heart
his palate completely dry
on the Galapitigala Road
thinking there is water in the forest

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

Review:

"Michael Ondaatje defies the normal distinction between poet and novelist. His writing is consistently tuned to a visionary pitch."--Graham Swift "His thrilling poems read like exquisite, unwritten Ondaatje novels."--"The Independent ""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"

About this edition

• Publisher: Alfred a Knopf Inc
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0375405593
• ISBN 13: 9780375405594
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 78