"Tumultuous, vibrant, tragic and over too soon." --Newsday
Handwriting is Michael Ondaatje's first new book of poetry since The Cinnamon Peeler. The exquisite poems collected here draw on history, mythology, landscape, and personal memories to weave a rich tapestry of images that reveal the longing for--and expose the anguish over--lost loves, homes, and language, as the poet contemplates scents and gestures and evokes a time when "handwriting occurred on waves, / on leaves, the scripts of smoke" and remembers a woman's "laughter with its / intake of breath. Uhh huh."
Crafted with lyrical delicacy and seductive power, Handwriting reminds us of Michael Ondaatje's stature as one of the finest poets writing today.
In the dry lands
every few miles, moving north, another roadside Ganesh
Straw figures on bamboo scaffolds to advertise a family of stilt-walkers
Men twenty feet high walking over fields crossing the thin road with their minimal arms and "lying legs"
A dance of tall men with the movement of prehistoric birds in practice before they alight
So men become gods in the small village of Ilukwewa
Ganesh in pink, in yellow, in elephant darkness His simplest shrine a drawing of him
lime chalk on a grey slate
All this glory preparing us for Anuradhapura
its night faith
A city with the lap and spell of a river
Families below trees around the heart of a fire
tributaries from the small villages of the dry zone
Circling the dagoba in a clockwise hum and chant, bowls of lit coal above their heads
whispering bare feet
Our flutter and drift
in the tow of this river
. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
"Richly sensual images.... [Ondaatje] contracts the narrative to a few concrete images, giving his verse a mysterious reticence." --The New York Times Book Review
"Poems that are virtual hybrids of the contemporary and the ancient." --Boston Book Review
"Smooth poetic lines.... Another finely polished Ondaatje gem." -- Time Out-New York
"Extremely beautiful." --Robert Hass, The Washington Post
"Tumultuous, vibrant, tragic and over too soon." --Newsday
Handwriting is Michael Ondaatje's first new book of poetry since The Cinnamon Peeler. The exquisite poems collected here draw on history, mythology, landscape, and personal memories to weave a rich tapestry of images that reveal the longing for--and expose the anguish over--lost loves, homes, and language, as the poet contemplates scents and gestures and evokes a time when "handwriting occurred on waves, / on leaves, the scripts of smoke" and remembers a woman's "laughter with its / intake of breath. Uhh huh."
Crafted with lyrical delicacy and seductive power, Handwriting reminds us of Michael Ondaatje's stature as one of the finest poets writing today.
Excerpt
In the dry lands
every few miles, moving north, another roadside Ganesh
Straw figures on bamboo scaffolds to advertise a family of stilt-walkers
Men twenty feet high walking over fields crossing the thin road with their minimal arms and "lying legs"
A dance of tall men with the movement of prehistoric birds in practice before they alight
So men become gods in the small village of Ilukwewa
Ganesh in pink, in yellow, in elephant darkness His simplest shrine a drawing of him
lime chalk on a grey slate
All this glory preparing us for Anuradhapura
its night faith
A city with the lap and spell of a river
Families below trees around the heart of a fire
tributaries from the small villages of the dry zone
Circling the dagoba in a clockwise hum and chant, bowls of lit coal above their heads
whispering bare feet
Our flutter and drift
in the tow of this river
. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Praise
"Richly sensual images.... [Ondaatje] contracts the narrative to a few concrete images, giving his verse a mysterious reticence." --The New York Times Book Review
"Poems that are virtual hybrids of the contemporary and the ancient." --Boston Book Review
"Smooth poetic lines.... Another finely polished Ondaatje gem." -- Time Out-New York
"Extremely beautiful." --Robert Hass, The Washington Post
