Michael Ondaatje’s A Year of Last Things glances back in time

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• Title: A Year of Last Things: Poems
• Author: Michael Ondaatje
• Genre: Poetry
• Publisher: Penguin Random House
• Pages: 128

A river runs through A Year of Last Things, but as Heraclitus had it, never the same one twice. Michael Ondaatje’s first book of poems in 25 years, Last Things collects remembrances, impressions and snapshots of a life lived long and travelled well. The poems are approachable, rich and always glance backward; dare to question what is remembered, what is forgotten and what might have happened.

Long-time Ondaatje readers will see familiar faces; Billy the Kid, Alice Gull and Skanda all return here. As does the writer’s enduring ekphrastic fascination, especially with photography – several poems describe photographs in detail, before subtly shifting just outside the frame. But Last Things is inviting, an ending, perhaps, but also the perfect place for new readers to begin.

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Lock, the poem that begins the collection, maps out one path through the book, through a life: “Reading the lines he loves / he slips them into a pocket,/ wishes to die with his clothes / full of torn-free stanzas /…” And so these poems borrow liberally the words of others, directly quote conversations between the poet and his loved ones, or lines from films, or other poems.

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Lock starts there, a man wishing to die with his torn collection, but it floats on, “until we reach that horizon / and drop, or rise / like a canoe within a lock / to search the other half of the river.” Ondaatje turns 81 this year, an age where the ultimate horizon undoubtedly looms.

Death is pervasive in Last Things. Throughout, Ondaatje’s poems articulate grief in many forms, mourning the loss of friends, imagining the last breaths of artists through history. There are poems that pause on some of the world’s great horrors, including What Can Be Named in the Earth, in which the speaker wanders through a zoological museum where “all data avoids the naming of cities, / rivers, ancient harbours.”

In the final stanza, the poem slides obliquely through a different institution: “Only at the Nadesan Centre / are there dated political maps / with named mass graves, the thousand illegal burials.” The Nadesan Centre is a Sri Lankan human-rights organization with a large legal library. It was founded in 1987, at the tail end of the first Eelam War between the Sinhalese majority and smaller Tamil populations of Sri Lanka.

A handful of the poems in Last Things see the speaker in Ondaatje’s native Sri Lanka, including the devastating prose poem Winchester House, which begins with a conversation with a childhood friend about a boarding school both he and Ondaatje attended. An image accompanies the poem, of a group of smiling schoolchildren playing cricket on the lawn. The prose takes us beyond the photograph, into the dark rooms where a certain instructor would take pleasure in beating the boys, the cruelty unseen and unspoken.

What Can Be Named begins with rock formations, waterways, the words we have for natural forms (the poem opens with a list: “Thuringite, zircon, arkose, / terra rosa limestone. Peat / in the Muthurajawela swamp”) and ends with a violence not so much unspeakable as unsaid – hundreds and hundreds of Tamil lives interrupted and ended, their massacred bodies poured into the open earth in an effort to have the Sri Lankan government’s war crimes go unnoticed, or unnamed.

While What Can Be Named in the Earth focuses on the mass grief of war, other poems zero in on the intimacies of certain loss. In November, for instance, the speaker searches out the empty corners of his house, where for 16 years a beloved house cat named Jack was wont to be: “Was it too soon or too late / that last summer of your life / when we watched you walk down to a river to take a sip / from its ongoing flow.”

The book takes its title from a suite of three poems called Last Things. The triptych begins one night in Florence, where the speaker dreams of Dante Alighieri falling into the body of a blue-tongued lizard before carrying a freshly written book up the stairs in the dark; in waking life, of course, the poet died the year he finished The Divine Comedy.

The Quick, the middle poem in the suite, opens with a friend on the visit to Florence: “Adjusting her sandal, losing her hair,” activities that echo, recur later in life; “Our storyline / feels almost continuous these years later / as if we are oaks lining the road / of a linear village, or within / a posthumous diary.”

The middle poem is a bridge between two periods, two stanzas in life – one day traipsing through Florence and another later day, visiting a friend on her deathbed. In the same line she adjusts her sandal and loses her hair, a side effect of the chemo not quite eradicating the cancer that will end her life.

The third poem, Below Dante, is addressed to the friend, the writer Constance Rooke, enduring her own year of last things: “Twenty years later, you were in a bed / on Brunswick Avenue. And I kissed your feet, Connie, one of my shy farewells.” How easily the poems slip from the past through the present, become their own records of how thin the membrane is between now and then.

Death is a constant, but still some things – poems, maps, photographs – endure beyond the final horizon. Put another way, the river runs its course, though for a magic, breathless moment it seems as if Ondaatje is able to hold it still on the page.