Michael Ondaatje’s ‘little fragments’ that lead to prize-winning work

A Year of Last Things, the first complete collection of poems Michael Ondaatje has published since Handwriting in 1998, begins with an image of a poet imagining his own death. “I’m 80 years old, so I guess you could say this is a pretty mortal book,” the Sri Lankan-Canadian poet and author explains from his home in Toronto. “There is an elegiac tone here, I think, for the first time in my writing.”

Like much of his fiction, Ondaatje’s verse can be abstract and ambivalent, something he alludes to in many of these poems. In Definition we witness a poet scanning through the pages of a Sanskrit dictionary and noticing how the roots of vowels take “an accent of high altitudes”. In Estuaries the author writes about how “there are places where language refuses to meet a reader”.

Michael Ondaatje says his new poems are about the gathering of a life story together.Credit: Getty

Ondaatje describes most of his writing (both poetry and prose) as “little fragments” he puts together, where a story eventually emerges: “These poems are really about the gathering of a life story together … and they do not follow a chronological time span.”

Journeys have played an integral part of Ondaatje’s biography. Since the early 1960s he has lived in Toronto, but he was born in 1943, in Sri Lanka. Aged 11, Ondaatje ventured to England, where he spent the next decade. He wrote about it in The Cat’s Table (2011). Set in the 1950s, the novel is narrated by an 11-year-old boy (also named Michael) who embarks on a ship from Sri Lanka to England. Ondaatje did indeed travel on a ship at that age, alone, without his parents, for 21 days.

He has taken a similar approach with his current book. “Some of the scenes in these poems seem factual, but actually some of them are invented. The main connection with this book of poems and The Cat’s Table is that the reader is not meant to be trying to follow a linear narrative.”

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A Year of Last Things also makes several references to previous books. In the poem Winchester House, for instance, we meet Skanda, a doctor, who appears in Anil’s Ghost (2000), which tells the story of Anil Tissera, the daughter of a Sri Lankan doctor who has been educated in Britain and America. After becoming a forensic pathologist, she returns home with an international human rights organisation, to investigate a series of what appear to be politically motivated murders connected to the decades-long civil war.

Researching the novel, Ondaatje spent some time with the late Clyde Snow, an American forensic anthropologist of international acclaim. In 1985, Snow excavated a mass grave where a right-wing military junta in Argentina had buried an estimated 30,000 civilians who vanished in the country’s “dirty war” against left-wing political dissidents. That same year, Snow took part in a global scientific manhunt that eventually led to identifying the remains, in a cemetery in Brazil, of the infamous Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele.

“Snow was an amazing and wonderful man who worked in various countries investigating crimes — and when he was in Sri Lanka, working with local forensic people showing them how they could research the past, I asked him if he could join him when he was there,” Ondaatje remembers. “I showed him my first draft of Anil’s Ghost and he gave me some [technical] pointers about what knives and tools a forensic anthropologist would typically use and so forth.”

Ondaatje speaks about his fascination with history, which he examines with forensic-like analysis in A Year of Last Things. In the poem, Wanderer, Ondaatje remembers the fate of a friend’s family in Warsaw during the Second World War. They were kept alive, the author tells us, by a German deserter “who roamed Europe like Odysseus”.

In A Night Radio Station in Koprivshtitsa, the poet finds himself in a Bulgarian church bathed in sunlight, staring at candles and statues, awed by centuries of history, where the mythical and the mystical constantly overlap. In A Bus To Fez, we read about a road trip Ondaatje took through North Africa during the 1960s.

Juliette Binoche and Ralph Fiennes in the Oscar-winning film The English Patient, which was adapted from Michael Ondaatje’s Booker prize-winning novel.

“I travelled through Morocco, which I didn’t really like, and then overland to Tunisia and Egypt, where I eventually flew to Sri Lanka,” Ondaatje recalls. “It was a very difficult journey. But some of the memories from that trip, especially my experience in Tunisia, later appeared as images in The English Patient (1992).”

The literary mystery romance novel is set in a bombed-out Italian villa-makeshift hospital during the final days of the Second World War. There we meet four protagonists who are dealing with their own respective war-scarred mental traumas. Among them is a man slowly dying of burns he received in a plane crash in the Sahara Desert. “For about 100 pages in this novel we have this patient who is sitting there practically saying nothing,” says Ondaatje, “I remember writing this, and I was almost waiting for him to say something. Then, when I eventually found his voice, I realised this was a very [unique] version of history.”

The novel was declared the joint winner of the Booker Prize in 1992, and in 2018 it was awarded The Golden Man Booker. The film adaptation of The English Patient starring Kristin Scott Thomas and Ralph Fiennes, and directed by Anthony Minghella, won nine Oscars at the Academy Awards in 1997, including best picture.

Ondaatje’s latest poems pay tribute to some of his favourite filmmakers. They include Lindsay Anderson, Akira Kurosawa, Ariane Mnouchkine, Chris Marker, and Walter Murch. Ondaatje first met Murch when the latter was editing The English Patient. They subsequently became close friends.

At the turn of the millennium, Ondaatje was watching Murch editing Apocalypse Now Redux (2001) — an extended version of Francis Ford Coppola’s epic 1979 war film. Witnessing Murch at work led to a series of insightful conversations about the art of filmmaking, specifically about the editing process.
Ondaatje convinced Murch to co-operate for a cultural project (a series of informal interviews) that resulted in The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film (2008).

“With that book I did with Walter Murch, I learnt so much about the process of editing,” Ondaatje says. “Writing poetry is quite similar to working on film, where you can just change everything, in terms of tone, pacing, colour or look, by editing a scene. That is why I love the art of rewriting.”

Over the past three years, Ondaatje has written only poetry. Taking a long break from fiction has given him a new sense of artistic freedom, he says: “There is a quick pace and a swerve in poetry that you don’t find in a lot of fiction.”

But what about the audience for poetry? Presumably it’s smaller than for his fiction? “Actually, what I have been discovering is that a lot more people are reading poetry today than they were during the time of, say, T.S. Eliot,” he says. “This book probably won’t have the same level of success as The English Patient,” Ondaatje concludes, “but as a poet you should never be working towards something you already know.”

A Year of Last Things is published by Jonathan Cape at $34.

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