Publishers Weekly
★ 01/15/2024
The dazzling latest by Ondaatje (The Story) brings his formidable literary gifts and imagination to bear on questions of memory and artistic process. Tenderly plumbing friends, ex-lovers, works of art, and “echoing rivers where we lost and found ourselves,” he writes of “all those small recalls of this and that/ before our walk up a staircase into the dark.” Photographs serve as especially potent aides-mémoires, and retrospection is more playful than onerous, even when recollected moments retain their dangerous charge (like “that abandoned time” in boarding school under the reign of an abusive priest, “his large body belted with a Christian cord of rope”). Each experience exists “not as memory, but like a gift/ from forgetfulness.” “Nothing stays still in a story,” Ondaatje reminds the reader, and, indeed, the narrative impulse holds sway in these lyric poems: “your bare feet on a mosaic in Gaza that could perhaps guide you like a terza rima towards a safe place to complete your story.” Poetry offers a place “beyond the familiar properties”: “the breaking line’s breath-like leap/ into the missed life// till there was no longer a story, only stillness/ or falling.” Speaking from and into times of extraordinary loss, the speaker asks: “Now we are less. How do we become more?” This collection radiates the joy of a fully realized, literary life. (Mar.)
From the Publisher
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
“Dazzling . . . This collection radiates the joy of a fully realized, literary life.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred
“Forgiveness, memory, and the vicissitudes of love are among the recurring themes of A Year of Last Things, Michael Ondaatje’s exceptional new collection of poetry . . . [Ondaatje’s return to poetry] is welcome, as he demonstrates yet again that he is a master of the genre.”
—BookPage, starred
“A poetry collection in which we ‘journey back through time by way of alchemical leaps, unearthing writings by revered masters, moments of shared tenderness, and the abandoned landscapes we hold on to to rediscover the influence of every border crossed.’”
—Lit Hub, “Most Anticipated Books of 2024”
Library Journal
★ 02/01/2024
There is something familiar and comforting in Ondaatje's poems, a kind of common sense that calls to the reader and invites them to consider when and where they might have seen, or felt, or feared anything like the poems describe. This is Booker Prize winner Ondaatje's 12th volume of poetry, though he is best known for novels like The English Patient. The verses are rich in imagery, yet quiet and contemplative in their observations. Nothing feels forced or imposed; always the poems feel like invitations to contemplate the moment, the truth, the magic of the actual. Ondaatje has a gift for drawing the mythic and the immediate together into a momentary memory of everything caught in the flickering glow of what might have been. VERDICT A powerful, thoughtful collection of observations and contemplations; a beautiful and valuable addition to the world of poetry by one of its most inspiring writers. Readers who love the work of W.S. Merwin, Mary Oliver, Billy Collins, and Louise Gluck will want to savor this new collection.—Herman Sutter
MARCH 2024 - AudioFile
It's always informative, at the least, to hear a poet's own readings of his work--even if those are not always the most evocative or entertaining renditions. Michael Ondaatje's poetry is quite fine; an earlier collection won the Governor General's Literary Award (Canada). But his performance of these works, alas, does not do them justice. The poems return again and again to historical and personal memory, but other themes appear as well. Forms and lengths vary, too. The author's voice, sadly, does not vary much. It is not quite a monotone, but the ranges of volume, tone, and pace are too narrow to serve the text well. The very short times between the poems can also make it hard to tell where one ends and the next begins. D.M.H. © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine
