A YEAR OF LAST THINGS BY MICHAEL ONDAATJE

In New York I heard Michael Ondaatje read from his newest book, A Year of Last Things, which is a collection of poems. Ondaatje is fairly soft spoken; so are the poems. And they are full of twilight and evening. Both the opening poem, “Lock,” and the closing poem center on a spot on a river, and on the magical lift (and resultant unfamiliar perspective) that a lock “in its evening light” enables:

Where you might see your friends
as altered by this altitude as you

The fresh summer grass,
the smell of the view—
dark water, August paint

At the reading Ondaatje was asked, predictably, what, when he writes a poem, spurs him into making poetry and not prose. I can’t remember his answer.