[In the following review, Merritt compares the historical themes and narrative elements of Handwriting with those of Running in the Family.]

As in his 1982 memoir Running in the Family, the subject and setting of Handwriting, Michael Ondaatje's latest book of poems, is Sri Lanka, the author's birthplace and childhood home; here comparisons end. Contrasts, however, abound. Whereas the memoir is a diffuse, meandering affair, cobbled out of anecdote, inference and rumor; Handwriting—spare, imagistic, lyrical—is a deep spell woven of history, imagination, and the chiaroscuro of fairy tale. While the memoir recites seemingly endless accounts of the shenanigans and social rounds of the prominent, European-influenced families of “Ceylon”—horse racing, tennis tournaments, flirtations and affairs, dress balls, drunks—, Handwriting focuses on the “Buried” culture of the island, turning its treasures to light and peering into “Wells” in search of “the deeper levels of the self.” Finally, as its title might suggest, Running in the Family concerns itself with inheritance: remembering (reinventing, really) a father largely lost to his son even in memory or discovering one's patronymic “chiseled in large letters” on the stone floor of a seventeenth-century church—an experience which, according to Ondaatje, “in some strange way removes vanity, eliminates the personal.” Handwriting, dedicated to Ondaatje's ayah or nurse and redolent of the fluid and mesmeric language and lore common to poet, prayer house, and nursery, lacks vanity and is a genuinely transpersonal book. As society is to culture, as surface is to depth, as patronymic is to mother tongue: thus is the relation of Michael Ondaatje's 1982 memoir Running in the Family to Handwriting, his present collection of poems.

Sri Lanka (25,332 square miles) is located in the Indian Ocean to the southeast of India. Consulting a concise reference work, one learns, among other things, that the Sinhalese, from Northern India, conquered the island's aboriginal inhabitants in the sixth century B.C.E., establishing their capital at Anuradhapura. After the introduction of Buddhism during the third century C.E., the island became one of the world centers of that religion. In subsequent centuries the island came under the rule of Europeans—Portuguese, Dutch, British—drawn by the spice trade. The crown colony of Ceylon (established by the British in 1798) was granted independence in 1948. In more recent times, the island has been plagued by economic crises and social unrest, including ethnic conflicts between the Tamil minority and the Sinhalese majority. It is against this history that the poems in the first section of Handwriting unfold. In “Buried,” for instance, Ondaatje juxtaposes—ultimately merging—Buddhist monks, in face of war, secreting the statues of their deity with modern insurgent soldiers hiding themselves in the jungle:

Men carrying recumbent Buddhas
or men carrying mortars
burning the enemy, disappearing
into pits when they hear helicopters.
… … … … … …
The statue the weight
of a cannon barrel,
bruising the naked shoulder as they run,
… … … … … …
Burying the Buddha in stone.
Covered with soft earth
then the corpse of an animal,
Planting a seed there.

In “Buried 2” we learn of those who “smuggled the tooth of the Buddha / from temple to temple for five hundred years,” of the drowning and, presumably, the arrival of Persian ships from the eighth century, engendering in the Sinhalese king dreams of water gardens, and of the lives and deaths of poets “hunted / for composing the arts of love and science / while there was war to celebrate.” There is also a wonderful catalogue of the flora commonly found “in the forest of kings,” a harrowing catalogue of the ravages of modern war, and a moving litany of “what we lost”:

The art of the drum. The art of eye-painting.
How to cut an arrow. Gestures between lovers.
The pattern of her teeth marks on his skin
drawn by a monk from memory.
The limits of betrayal. The five ways
a lover could mock an ex-lover.

Make no mistake though, Handwriting is not yet another record to be entered into the already teeming late-twentieth-century annals of victimization; on the contrary, Ondaatje's vision is redemptive in the sense that it refuses the lure of powerlessness, insisting instead on a human agency that, whatever the odds and the external pressures, always allows for the possibility of our choosing or of our having chosen otherwise. After the litany of losses, he writes: “All this we burned or traded for power and wealth / from the eight compass points of vengeance // from the two levels of envy.”

The second section of Handwriting is given over to a sequence of eleven chiefly undistinguished love poems, but the third section alone is worth the price of admission. The poems in this section celebrate scenes of devotion and desire: “On the morning of a full moon / in a forest monastery / thirty women in white / meditate on the precepts of the day / until darkness”; “In the high plum-surrounded library / where Yang Weizhem studied as a boy / a movable staircase was pulled away / to insure his solitary concentration.” This last quote is from the lovely poem of art and friendship “The Great Tree”; also memorable are “The Story,” “Wells,” “Step,” “Last Ink,” and the prose poem “Death at Kataragama,” an eloquent and compelling articulation of the ethos of the imagination:

There is a woodpecker I am enamored of I saw this morning through my binoculars. A red thatch roof to his head more modest than crimson, deeper than blood. Distance is always clearer. … I bend too close to the page to get nearer to what is being understood. What I write will drift away. I will be able to understand the world only at arm's length. …

We depart into worlds that have nothing to do with those we love. This woman whose arm I would hold and comfort, that book I wanted to make and shape tight as a stone—I would give everything away for this sound of mud and water, hooves, great wings

Much of what we love is bound up, one way or another, with the ego, that most fragile sense of who we are, and many of the stories that we choose to tell, casting them more or less well in the guises of art, are held to be significant precisely because they are ours. But true art—really the only art there is—that has the power to nourish or to heal, to hold accountable or to change the heart or mind, like the richest cultures, springs up at the crossroads where we are required to encounter what is not us and is not ours. In “Last Ink,” Handwriting's closing poem, Ondaatje speaks of “the moment in the heart / where I roam restless, searching / for the thin border of the fence / to break through or leap. // Leaping and bowing.” In his latest book of poems, he has found that place; we applaud his graceful leaps; we return the bow.