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Michael Ondaatje's first book of poems. Originally published in 1967.
William Bonney first killed another man when he was just twelve. By the time he was twenty-one he had slain nineteen more. He was known as Billy the Kid, a bloodthirsty outlaw; a boy with buck teeth and a pleasant face who could shoot a stranger in the heart and calmly walk away while birds ravaged the corpse. Drawing on contemporary accounts, photographs, dime novels and his own imagination, Ondaatje takes you inside the mind of Billy the Kid, tracing his bloody passage across the blasted landscape of New Mexico and through the battles with his captor and eventual killer, Pat Garrett.
Selected and new poems offer glimpses of a private world in which images of horror are viewed through mirrors and prisms and in which madmen and animals inhabit a landscape of fearful natural beauty
The first full-length book of new poems from this poet in more than a decade, this collection is marked by Ondaatje's command of a broad range of poetic forms and by his characteristic juxtapositions of the everyday and the exotic
Michael Ondaatje’s new selected poems, The Cinnamon Peeler , brings together poems written between 1963 and 1990, including work from his most recent collection, Secular Love . These poems bear witness to the extraordinary gifts that have won high praise for this truly original poet and novelist.
"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.
In his novels, poetry, and memoirs, Booker Prize winner Michael Ondaatje moves from the blasted landscape of Billy the Kid in 1880s New Mexico to the New Orleans jazz world of the legendary Buddy Bolden at the turn of the century, from his native Sri Lanka to the African desert of World War II. Compassionate, lyrical, spellbinding, the work he has created unfolds with mystery and eloquence and enlarges our literature. Included in Vintage Ondaatje are portions of the novels Anil’s Ghost , In the Skin of the Lion , Coming Through Slaughter , and The English Patient ; the memoir Running in the Family ; sections from The Collected Works of Billy the Kid ; and a selection of the poetry. Vintage Readers are a perfect introduction to some of the great modern writers, presented in attractive, affordable paperback editions.
Michael Ondaatje's poems have been celebrated by readers and writers alike for containing some of the most memorable and moving verse written in the past half-century. The Story combines Ondaatje's sensual writing with watercolor illustrations by celebrated painter David Bolduc, making a unique item. Left-hand pages contain Bolduc's art while right-hand pages contain Ondaatje's poem both typeset and in the author's own handwriting. This elegant housing is a fitting accompaniment to Ondaatje's elegaic poem, which follows his larger themes love, memory, family, exile even as it unfolds into "our dismantled childhoods," and offers readers the opportunity to extend its narrative into their own lives.