A Year of Last Things

With A Year of Last Things, acclaimed novelist Michael Ondaatje returns to poetry, looking back on a life of displacement and discovery


Born 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 Molière’s 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 poem:

Reading the lines he loves
he slips them into a pocket,
wishes to die with his clothes
full of torn-free stanzas
and the telephone numbers
of his children in far cities

Poetry – where language is made to work hardest and burns with a gem-like flame - is what Ondaatje has returned to in this intimate history.

Review

After a break of nearly 20 years, Ondaatje has returned to poetry, ruminating on sliding doors moments in life… This is a generous, moving book ― Guardian

Extraordinarily attuned to hauntings… Ondaatje is a connoisseur – and creator – of atmospheres… Wonderful ― Observer, *Poetry Book of the Month*

Each new book of Michael Ondaatje’s is a literary event, but that is particularly true for his books of poetry. In A Year of Last Things he comes close to writing something like a timeless poem, “a memory poem” that reflects outside and inside time at the same moment, recording the mercurial, mysterious feeling of being alive. The poems become intimate, unresolved stories, loyal to feeling and presence, the lyricism of dreams applied to narratives of lives and landscapes. A Year of Last Things is a remarkable, incomparable new collection -- Terrance Hayes, author of So to Speak

Michael Ondaatje’s love of the world and its wonders, the kindness he offers, the elegant lyricism of his sentences, the joy of storytelling... restore belief in the beauty and power of literature and, by extension, of humanity -- Aleksandar Hemon, author of The Lazarus Project

Michael Ondaatje defies the normal distinction between poet and novelist. His writing is consistently tuned to a visionary pitch -- Graham Swift, author of Waterland

My life always stops for a new book by Michael Ondaatje -- Jhumpa Lahiri, author of The Namesake

Dazzling...This collection radiates the joy of a fully realized, literary life ― Publishers Weekly

About the Author

Michael Ondaatje is the author of seven novels; a memoir, Running in the Family; a non-fiction book on film, The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film; and several books of poetry, including The Cinnamon Peeler and Handwriting. The English Patient received the Booker Prize in 1992 and the Golden Man Booker in 2018, and was made into a film directed by Anthony Minghella. Anil’s Ghost was awarded the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, the Giller Prize and the Prix Médicis. Born in Sri Lanka, Michael Ondaatje lives in Toronto.