Lyricism

Handwriting - Michael Ondaatje (Vintage International, 2000, c1998)


Damn I love Michael Ondaatje. (Note to self: must read/watch English Patient again.) I just wish I loved poetry as much. I am learning things about poetry, like that you can't (well, I can't) just sit and read it where you might read a book or magazine. Poetry requires some level of solitude, and the ability to speak it aloud, to feel the words on your tongue. Poetry also excels at intimacy, and I've been aware of the way my voice changes when sharing verse with a lover.

See folks? This is what Ondaatje does to me. I meant to tell you about how frustrated I felt at my difficulty entering the poems, and instead I went down some wholly other road. So back to this slim volume of poems, set mostly in Sri Lanka, or at least the feeling of Sri Lanka. (They written both there and in Canada.) Like his prose, they are lush and rich. But so challenging.

I found myself captivated by the second part (of three) - a single poem cycle (?) called "The Nine Sentiments," as sexy as most of his writing tends to be. And a line from the final poem, "Last Ink":

I want to die on your chest but not yet,
she wrote, sometime in the 13th century
of our love

Sometime in the 13th century of our love....