Handwriting: Poems (Vintage International) - Softcover

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Michael Ondaatje is the author of three previous novels, a memoir and eleven books of poetry. His novel The English Patient won the Booker Prize. Born in Sri Lanka, he moved to Canada in 1962 and now lives in Toronto.

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The exquisite poems collected in Handwriting -- Michael Ondaatje's first book of new poems since The Cinnamon Peeler -- recall "the vista of a life". Drawing on history, mythology, landscape, and personal memories of Sri Lank, Ondaatje weaves a rich tapestry of images that evoke desire for -- and anguish over -- scents and gestures of lost loves, homes, and language. The verses, at turns spare and luminous, demonstrate the poet's unique artistry as he contemplates "the mirror world of art" in a time before books, when "handwriting occurred on waves, / on leaves, the scripts of smoke", recounts medieval monks "burying the Buddha in stone" amid the battle fire of war, and remembers a woman's "laughter with its/ intake of breath. Uhh huh".

Crafted with lyrical delicacy and seductive power, Handwriting reminds us of Michael Ondaatje's stature as one of the finest poets writing today.

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"Tumultuous, vibrant, tragic and over too soon." --"Newsday
Handwriting is Michael Ondaatje's first new book of poetry since The Cinnamon Peeler. The exquisite poems collected here draw on history, mythology, landscape, and personal memories to weave a rich tapestry of images that reveal the longing for--and expose the anguish over--lost loves, homes, and language, as the poet contemplates scents and gestures and evokes a time when "handwriting occurred on waves, / on leaves, the scripts of smoke" and remembers a woman's "laughter with its / intake of breath. Uhh huh."
Crafted with lyrical delicacy and seductive power, Handwriting reminds us of Michael Ondaatje's stature as one of the finest poets writing today.

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In the dry lands

every few miles, moving north,
another roadside Ganesh

Straw figures
on bamboo scaffolds
to advertise a family
of stilt-walkers

Men twenty feet high
walking over fields
crossing the thin road
with their minimal arms
and "lying legs"

A dance of tall men
with the movement of prehistoric birds
in practice before they alight

So men become gods
in the small village
of Ilukwewa

Ganesh in pink,
                         in yellow,
in elephant darkness
His simplest shrine
a drawing of him

lime chalk
on a grey slate

All this glory
preparing us for Anuradhapura

its night faith

A city with the lap
and spell of a river

Families below trees
around the heart of a fire

tributaries
from the small villages
of the dry zone

Circling the dagoba
in a clockwise hum and chant,
bowls of lit coal
above their heads

whispering bare feet

Our flutter and drift

in the tow of this river