Handwriting Book

Sumptuous, steamy, downright sexy: on the blush-o-meter Ondaatje scores a 10. Those who can't get enough of his melodious prose--most notably in The English Patient, which earned him a Booker in 1992--will find the same lyrical genius in his verse. In this collection Ondaatje transports us to his childhood home of Sri Lanka. With strikingly sensuous imagery, he conjures a land of bangles, cattle bells, stilt-walkers and a 1000- year-old buddha "buried in Anuradhapura earth, eyes half closed, hands / in a gesture of meditation...roots / like the fingers of a blind monk / spread for two hundred years over his face." As the title suggests, Handwriting is an elegaic tribute to the ancients who in "wild cursive scripts...spent all their years / writing one good book" only to be killed for toasting "the work of the day / the shadow pleasures of night...while there was war to celebrate." In his Sanskrit and Tamil love poem, "The Nine Sentiments," Ondaatje not only proves most definitively that music is the key to unlocking a reader's heart, but also argues for the healing powers of poetry in times of strife: The brush of sandalwood along a collarbone Green dark silk A shoe left on the cadju tree terrace these nights when 'pools are reduced by constant plungings' Meanwhile a man's burning heart his palate completely dry on the Galapitigala Road thinking there is water in the forest The final poem, "Last Ink," explains why the need to preserve human experience through art is as instinctive as the desire to die in a lover's arms. Dealing with large-scale emotions and scenes of love and war, these are poems that strike to the heart. --Martha Silano Read More