Michael Ondaatje is a master of the fragment. For decades, his writing has explored the personal and the historical with an understanding that truth is always subject to change. He has brought to life fictional and historical characters alike, supplementing scant evidence with a painterly eye for physical detail and a uniquely attuned sense of the desires that drive human action. Born in Ceylon (modern-day Sri Lanka) in 1943, Ondaatje spent his childhood in Colombo before moving to England with his mother in 1954. After emigrating to Montreal in 1962 and attending university, he established himself as a major figure in twentieth-century Canadian literature with well-regarded works of poetry and critically acclaimed historical fiction, including his Booker Prize-winning novel The English Patient (1992). With A Year of Last Things (Knopf, 2024), his first collection of poetry in eighteen years, Ondaatje offers a portrait of a past that is always in flux, its connection to the present and future at once indisputable and tentative. For Ondaatje, there is no perfect recollection of events, of a life. To claim otherwise, he seems to suggest, would be as foolish as reassembling a block of marble when all you have are the finished sculpture, the hammer and chisel, a million indistinguishable fragments, the dust on your skin and in the air.
Ondaatje’s poetry is always unsettled because knowledge and the past are also on the move, resisting his efforts to record and communicate them. Having waded into a poem, Ondaatje habitually looks backward, invoking scenes from memory and history alike. In “What Can Be Named in the Earth,” he summons the language of archaeology, cartography, and museology to move from the geological – “Thuringite, zircon, arkose, / terra rosa limestone” – to the human, invoking fraught histories such as his native Sri Lanka’s decades-long civil war: “Only at the Nadesan Centre / are there dated political maps / with named mass graves, / the thousand illegal burials.” As much as Ondaatje endeavors to keep a record of loss, he also recognizes that recording the past can abstract it, and that the passage of time can erase the “evidence of human life” as well as the dead themselves, submerging them in strata in which only stones keep their names.
Despite his ambivalence towards the work of remembering, Ondaatje frequently attempts to reframe history, to see it through the eyes of the defeated and the downtrodden. Throughout the collection, Ondaatje’s ability to shift from the personal to the collective, to move across vast swaths of time often in the same poem, lends gravity and credibility to his observations on the malleability of both memory and history while also clarifying his vision for the role of the artist in society. In “A Cricket in Oplontis 79 CE,” the poet walks through the ruins of a Roman villa and imagines not the lives of its owners but of its builders: “Only insignificant things survived / the Vesuvian lava and ash // along with the names of one or two craftsmen / who conceived a floor design.” The poet’s eye for the “insignificant” – “the pipes in the walls like dry veins”; “a painted basket, a painted cricket” – offers new ways of looking at the past, and in turn at ourselves in the present.
The politics of class lend weight to Ondaatje’s approach here, suggesting that poetry at its most effective can allow us to engage with subjects that were never meant to be remembered, let alone celebrated. Highlighting the “insignificant,” Ondaatje recognizes that the act of seeing, and in turn the project of writing, are always already political in nature. As such, he pays no mind to the opulent lives of those who lived in these rooms, decentering them from the historical record as he imagines instead a painter who “has recorded the gestures of actors, / evoked the brief want between / man and woman, man and man, / disguising his own name within a corner.”
One gets the sense he is drawing on a lifetime of writing here as he praises how the artist creates something worth saving, however minor, something that can transcend and perhaps even shape the course of history. Ondaatje’s uncertainty regarding the impossible act of making a record of loss operates in tension with his need to enter seemingly minor details into the aesthetic and historical record:
All day the quiet beauty of these
lost things by someone
who was good at women
or figs or perspective
on a table’s architecture
before a garden
Nothing else lasted,
as if these might be the only memory
of ourselves when we are gone
Science and patience excavate with brushstrokesand a house emerges without masters or slaves
Ondaatje imagines a world where Ozymandias has already been forgotten, where the unnamed artist survives because of an innate understanding of time and the inevitability of death, an ability and willingness to make a “skeleton in the atrium / of every household before he leaves.” The memento mori serves as an act of defiance against the wealthy patron who has “fed [the artist] with the servants” after praising “his famousness,” a signature motif to remind them of the common fate of all humanity, regardless of class or status.
The collection abounds with reflections on the function and necessity of art in human life. In its opening poem “Lock,” the poet reflects on the capacity of poems to help us remember:
as those torn lines remind us
how to recall
until we reach that horizon
and drop, or rise
like a canoe within a lockto search the other half of the river
As the poem progresses, the speaker recalls how he “loved that lock when [he] saw it / all those summers ago.” In this simple turn, Ondaatje shows how memory enters the poem first as metaphor and then as a story to be recollected, how the plunge into a poem is a foray into the world of words and images built up over a writer’s lifetime. At the end, however, the poet suggests there is a darker side to this desire to plunge into the past: “Even then I wanted / to slip into the wet dark / … / where nothing could be seen / that was a further story.” There’s a sense of exhaustion here, of feeling death’s pull and wondering what it would be like to answer its call. For Ondaatje, a lifetime of writing historical fiction and poetry engaged with personal and collective histories is also a lifetime of wrestling with the tension between the impulse to record and the impossibility of making an accurate record. As a writer myself, I thought this recognition was oddly validating. Art is work, after all; as much as it enriches our lives, it also takes a toll.
Later in the collection, “The Geography Sixth” looks back at Ondaatje’s childhood as one of “the unselected ones… / kept from certain classrooms without knowledge / of what was taught there.” He remembers a youth among his fellow outcasts “stalled in ‘The Geography Sixth’ studying / flood plains, maps of far pilgrimages,” who snuck away from school to drink and meet girls, receiving another kind of education, “witnessing how characters evolved / from a fragment to become assured though / more damaged, revealed but better hidden.” The poem traces the development of the writerly sensibility that would guide Ondaatje throughout his career as a poet and novelist of history and memory, whose most memorable characters always emerge from fragments: Billy the Kid cut down in his youth, of whom no written word and only one photograph remains; or Charlie Bolden, the cornet-playing inventor of jazz, who was largely unheralded in his lifetime and sent to an asylum where he died in obscurity; or even the English Patient, a man burned beyond all recognition who recalls his life for strangers as though it had been lived by someone else. At the end of “The Geography Sixth,” Ondaatje reflects on the uncertainty of youth, in which some “lay / drunk on the grass, without hope of a significant life,” and, echoing “Lock,” he recalls how he and his friends “had no idea whether we might leap up or down / into a further story.” Here as elsewhere the poet hones in on a moment in time to show that what we later recognize as history was never so clear in the present, and that narrative only emerges after the fact of our having lived through uncertainty.
As an artist of significant accomplishment and esteem, Ondaatje is perhaps surprisingly vulnerable in his representation of his personal life and preoccupations as a writer. He places himself at the heart of his poetry as both character and seer while refusing to fully conceal or reveal himself. This tendency recalls a scene from Ondaatje’s 1992 novel The English Patient, in which the titular character describes Caravaggio’s David with the Head of Goliath. In the painting, the English Patient recounts, Caravaggio used his own likeness both for the face of the young warrior David and for the severed head of Goliath. Similarly, Ondaatje the poet holds Ondaatje the character on display for his readers to see and judge on equal terms. If Ondaatje is often credited with bringing a poet’s sensibility to his novels, here he brings a novelist’s perspective to his poetry, offering complex narratives and characters as well as a sense of the substance of fiction as something slippery, though often more vivid than life.
In keeping with this interest in the malleability of truth, Ondaatje’s poetry shifts with ease between subjects, people, places, and moments in time, moving like water as it plots a course, floods its banks, or dries up and recedes into the ground. This is perhaps most apparent in the sequence “A Night Radio Station in Koprivshtitsa,” my favorite poem in A Year of Last Things. Both reader and poet are adrift, shifting from California to Bulgaria, from the rules of Ottoman architecture to the methods of icon painting: “Country eggs in tempera to depict warriors. / City eggs to glisten the serene pale / faces of women in court, / or the imprisoned. Or a saint.”
Despite reading that “Icons do not travel,” we move with the travelling icons themselves, as they “journey into specific villages to be repainted,” and as they are taken “from Athens, to Sofia, to Koprivshtitsa, to Plovdiv and beyond,” allowing the paintings to “witness local history as they travel the rutted roads, as if they too are moving now within murals of altering despair, poverty, disorganized lives.” Later, we find ourselves in Koprivshtitsa, listening to a radio station late at night as music gives way to ghostly callers who offer “tentative confessions in varying languages,” a soporific scene that revels in the haze between waking and dreaming life. The poem then winds its way through California again and back to the titular Bulgarian village before concluding in the middle of a conversation between a disembodied voice of a woman and the speaker, who recalls meeting her “the day after [he] slept in the thin uncomfortable, bed of Heinrich Heine in Düsseldorf, when [he] did not even know of [her], had not yet even desired [her], and was awake all night.” Despite or perhaps because of the writer’s peregrinations and disjunctions, his shifts from lineated poetry into prose, I was grateful to be along for the ride, fully engrossed in the journey.
Ondaatje understands that “[m]ost stories remain unresolved, / undiscovered, like the breaking of a rule,” and he uses this uncertainty to propel his poetry into uncharted waters. If stories remain unresolved, however, then so do most lives. Whether looking back at his own long life, the life of a dearly missed cat, or the life of a woman from before she became both a lover and a friend, the Ondaatje of A Year of Last Things cannot help but to look forward, hopeful there will always be “a further story.” His readers will almost certainly feel the same.
Thomas Higgins is a Queens-based poet who is currently pursuing an MFA in creative writing at The New School. His poetry and reviews have appeared in The Adroit Journal, Hoxie Gorge Review, the minnesota review, and elsewhere.