A Year of Last Things

Michael Ondaatje

£14.99

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Vintage Publishing
21 March 2024
ISBN: 9781787335035
Hardback
128 pages

From the publisher

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

'My life always stops for a new book by him' JHUMPA LAHIRI

'A generous, moving book' GUARDIAN

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 Moliere'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.