by Joy Kogawa
|
by Margaret Atwood
|
by Madeleine Thien
|
by Susanna Moodie
|
Canadian Poetry from the Beginnings through the First World War by Carole Gerson |
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
Product Description
Amazon.ca
Twenty-five years before an international crew built highways and camps in the Tunisian desert to film The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje released The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, a hybrid of poetry, prose, and photographs he once described as "the film I couldn't afford to shoot." Like the similarly polymorphous Coming Through Slaughter (1976) and Running in the Family (1982), the shape-shifting Billy is intensely concerned with sex, death, and machines.
The virtuosity of later Ondaatje characters Buddy Bolden, Temelcoff, Caravaggio, and Kip is here found in the "machine-like left hand" of the famous gunslinger Billy the Kid. As startlingly and intimately violent as Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy, Billy's fusion of poetry and prose creates a uniquely associative and perspectival voice: "The hands were cold as porcelain, one was silver old bone stripped oak white eastern cigarettes white sky the eye core of sun." The carousel of changing speakers offers a vividly fractured portrait of Billy, jumping from the distance of rumour and legend to the psychological intimacy of first-hand accounts.
On the lam in an abandoned barn, Billy convalesces to the hideous sound of rats gorging themselves on fermented grain. As Billy tells it, "[I] filled my gun and fired again and again into their slow wheel across the room at each boommm, and reloaded and fired again and again." In this unapologetically observant examination of the mechanization of both violence and art, Ondaatje, a confessed "child of the bijoux," simultaneously depicts and denounces the dangerously infectious glamour of graceful villains. --Darryl Whetter --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Book Description
From the Booker Prize-winning author of The English Patient comes a visionary novel, a virtuoso synthesis of storytelling, history, and myth, about William Bonney, a.k.a. "Billy the Kid, " a bloodthirsty ogre and outlaw saint. "Ondaatje's language is clean and energetic, with the pop of bullets."--Annie Dillard.
Tag this product(What's this?)Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organize and find favorite items. |
What do customers ultimately buy after viewing this item?
 |
50% buy the item featured on this page: The Collected Works of Billy the Kid |
 |
50% buy The Collected Works of Billy the Kid CDN$ 13.10 |
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
|||||||||||||
Most helpful customer reviews
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
Most recent customer reviews |
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
Your Recent History
(What's this?)|
After viewing product detail pages or search results, look here to find an easy way to navigate back to pages you are interested in. |
