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

'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 Moli re 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.