Michael Ondaatje's new collection of poems, Handwriting, his first since The Cinnamon Peeler (1992), comes at a time when he has lent a whole new definition to an area of writing that resides within the undefined area of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. If we take this collection as a continuation of his memoir Running in the Family (1982), we can see the exact graph-plotting of the last fifteen years—his subtle movement and blurring of lines between different genres, in spite of respecting the integrity of each of them.

In Handwriting, as compared to Running in the Family, the writing is sparer where minimalism is enhanced by reducing the focus's measure to the precision of a razor's micron edge. There is a minimum expenditure of words, fine-tuned movement that incorporates as its primary tool suggestiveness and all that falls in that subtle space.

In the poem “The First Rule of Sinhalese Architecture” the deft use of white space, the short lines, and the absence of full-stops allow readers to breathe and interpret with maximum effect: “Never build three doors / in a straight line // A devil might rush / through them / deep into your house, / into your life.” Ondaatje, however, uses minimum effort to achieve all this, and only because his verse is highly distilled.

Handwriting takes one to Ondaatje's Sri Lankan past, a past that is very much present in his life, one that informs and colors his broader palette, scope, and vision. The fact that he can present Sri Lanka realistically and unexotically lends a believable and even magical edge to his text. His observations are sharp and wry, but at the same time considered, wise, and pragmatic. Here is the opening of the poem “To Anuradhapura”:

In the dry lands
every few miles, moving north,
another roadside Ganesh
Straw figures
on bamboo scaffolds
to advertise a family
of stilt-walkers

The volume is also a fine example of when free verse succeeds, free of all forced and encumbered prosody and poetics but containing the exactitude of breath and breathing.

Reading Ondaatje's poems is akin to going through a darkroom experience, developing a negative to a positive—slow, gentle, translucent, and evocative. But he uses a trusty, old-fashioned camera where all the manual settings of shutter speed and focal length are done with the skill and art of a seasoned calligrapher. In “The Brother Thief” we read: “Beyond this pupil of heat / all geography is burned // No mountain or star / no river noise, / nothing / to give him course. // … // Dark peace, / like a cave of water.”

Many of Ondaatje's poems are packed with sexual imagery, made even more powerful by their heightened coyness and understated suggestion: “Her sisters / who dove, lit by flares, / were lightning // Water and erotics” (from “The Siyabaslakara”) is reminiscent of a scene in his Booker Prize-winning novel The English Patient. Or savor the wonderfully wrought sequence “The Nine Sentiments”: “She stands in the last daylight / of the bedroom painting her eye, / holding a small mirror // The brush of sandalwood along the collarbone // Green dark silk”: or “Desire in sunlight // … // Kissing the birthmark / on a breast, / tugging his lotus stalk.”

Among Ondaatje's many talents is the way he juxtaposes the epigrammatic and the narrative, ancient and modern, spirituality and sexual liberty, all in one grand journey, as he travels and photographs “a libertine … who made love before nightfall / … without darkening the room.” Some of my favorite poems include the prose poem “Death at Kataragama,” the montage-narrative of “A Gentleman Compares His Virtue to a Piece of Jade,” “Buried,” and “Buried 2.” Others are “The Siyabaslakara,” “House on a Red Cliff,” “Last Ink,” and of course “The Distance of a Shout,” whose concluding lines sum up much of the collection: “Handwriting occurred on waves, / on leaves, the scripts of smoke, / a sign on a bridge along the Mahaweli River. // A gradual acceptance of this new language.”

Michael Ondaatje's Handwriting is at the same time elliptical and careful, raw and perfectly pitched, but always beautifully conceived and delicately etched in “wild cursive scripts” with the stylized slant of a fine and practiced hand.