Ondaatje, Michael - Michael O'Neill (review date 5 February 1999)
Michael O'Neill (review date 5 February 1999)
SOURCE: O'Neill, Michael. “Gazes in the Mirror-World.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 5001 (5 February 1999): 33.
[In the following review, O'Neill assesses the technique, language, and themes of Handwriting.]
When Hana plays the piano in Michael Ondaatje's novel The English Patient, she is described as “just chording sound, reducing melody to a skeleton”. It is a description that might be applied to Ondaatje's latest volume of poems. By contrast with his fiction, and its lust for a kinetic sensuousness, these poems seem less to flesh out than to suggest. Floating and juxtaposing phrases in the manner of Pound's Cantos or Gary Snyder's Zen-like notations, they often possess the wiry lightness of a sketch. And yet the poems in Handwriting reveal, in their return to Sri Lanka, the poet's birthplace, the sixth-sense awareness of danger which makes vivid the piano-playing...
[The entire page is 773 words long]
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