Michael Ondaatje A Year of Last Things Hardback Book

With A Year of Last Things, acclaimed novelist Michael Ondaatje returns to poetry, looking back on a life of displacement and discoveryMy life always stops for a new book by him JHUMPA LAHIRIA generous, moving book GUARDIANBorn in Sri Lanka during the Second World War, Ondaatje was sent as a child to school in London, and later moved to Canada. While he has lived there since, these poems reflect the life of a writer, traveller and watcher of the world describing himself as a mongrel, someone born out of diverse cultures. Here, rediscovering the influence of every border crossed, he moves back and forth in time, from a childhood in Sri Lanka to Molires chair during his last stage performance, from icons in Bulgarian churches to the Californian coast and loved Canadian rivers, merging memory with the present, looking back on a life of displacement and discovery, love and loss. As he writes in the opening poemReading the lines he loveshe slips them into a pocket, wishes to die with his clothesfull of tornfree stanzasand the telephone numbersof his children in far citiesPoetry where language is made to work hardest and burns with a gemlike flame is what Ondaatje has returned to in this intimate history. | Michael Ondaatje A Year of Last Things Hardback Book