Review
“
Handwriting is deft and intellectual.…[Ondaatje’s poems] allude to sensuality, desire, the form these take in language.…There are pure images and Ondaatje’s trademark rhythms and diction…there are lines that stun with emotional immediacy and compression of life’s facets.…
Handwriting captures Sri Lanka’s violence, the turmoils that erased an alphabet and its poets, threatened to silence an ancient culture and bury desire and its twin, faith, in mud and rubble. These poems bear witness to Sri Lanka’s history and enact Ondaatje’s inheritance.”
–
Quill & Quire (starred review)
“This is a breathtaking collection, as fine as any that I have read in several years. 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 and admiring both its beauty and wisdom.”
–Sam Solecki,
Books in Canada“Michael Ondaatje [is] a force in our literature.…[
Handwriting is] an occasion.…[In
Handwriting] he’s reverted to both his birthplace and the core of his art.…Ondaatje weaves fact, legend, magic and myth into a dense scroll.…A lovely volume…An Ondaatje book is rather like a train journey in which the traveller sees wondrous sights and miraculous events flash by at the window.…”
–
Globe and Mail
“The more I have read, the richer and more beguiling these poems have become.…In
Handwriting, he has chosen, with great deliberateness and passionate intelligence, to explore the poetic history of his birthplace.…Ondaatje hasn’t lost his touch for the telling detail.…It may be seen as one of Ondaatje’s finest artifices, a beautiful demonstration of the emotional authenticity of pure art. To quote a line out of context would undermine the care with which so many different moods are juxtaposed, collating various images and conventional romantic phrases to make a palimpsest of desire through time.…[Ondaatje has pushed] his art in new directions. The gain is all ours.”
–
Calgary Herald
“Whether Michael Ondaatje holds us spellbound with the “sensuous stalk” and “sacred flower” in “Step” or leaves skidmarks on our hearts swerving through history in “The Story,” [he has a] flair for creating flawlessly rendered moments.…A perceptive chronicler working the surreal edges of the world.…[These poems are] majestic in their cryptic precision and evocative lucidity.…Destined for greatness…Ondaatje unfailingly leads readers to a liminal space which paradoxically shapes, shifts and breaks new ground.…”
–Judith Fitzgerald,
Toronto Star“Michael Ondaatje defies the normal distinction between poet and novelist. His writing is consistently turned to a visionary pitch.”
–Graham Swift
“Ondaatje is one of the country’s best, a formidable craftsman and artist.…The intensity and originality of his language are rare.”
–Kingston
Whig-Standard“Michael Ondaatje’s poems read with the same whimsical precision and authority one finds in his prose. He is the most sensibly ironic writer I’ve read in years, and the most generously disposed. Would that all worlds were this deftly attended.”
–Robert Creeley
From the Hardcover edition.
Product Description
In his most recent collection,
Handwriting, Michael Ondaatje gives us poems of delicacy and power--poems about love, landscape, and the sweep of history, set in his first home, Sri Lanka. He weaves stories of war and love, of kings and robbers, and two millennia of culture, into a rich tapestry of images, a lament for lost homes, lost loves, and lost ways of expression. Like the ancient poets who "wrote their stories on rock and leaf / to celebrate the work of the day, / the shadow pleasures of the night," Ondaatje writes of desire and longing; the curve of a bridge against a woman's foot; the figure of a man walking through a rainstorm to a tryst; the pattern of teeth marks on skin, drawn by a monk from memory.
Handwriting is a poetic achievement by a writer at the height of his creative powers, reaffirming his unique artistry with language and his stature as one of the finest poets writing today.
Total playing time: 50 minutes
Unabridged and read by the author
Produced by Don Edwards
