A Year of Last Things - Michael Ondaatje Gebunden

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 author of The Namesake 'Timeless... Remarkable incomparable' TERRANCE HAYES author of So to Speak 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 cultur es. Here rediscovering the influence of every border crossed he moves back and forth in time from a childhood in Sri Lanka to Molière'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 loveshe slips them into a pocket wishes to die with his clothesfull of torn-free stanzasand the telephone numbersof 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.