But it is a 'little' book, a portrait in miniature, and eventually limited by Billy's own character. This is a poetry filled with odd angles of vision, but it lacks the kind of spectral music it seems to need. It's a poetry that mixes the bizarre and commonplace, but its accents are prosaic . . . But there is a yearning for wonder in this poetry, and a curiosity that informs the imaginative life of his poetry at its best. Not all of them.
Crucial events go unexplained . . .
It's like life itself. . . . Mr. Ondaatje's acknowledgments testify to his meticulous research, and the kinesthetic vitality of his descriptions bears it out. . . . The playwright Michael Ondaatje is a young Canadian poet and film maker, and in fact this 'Billy the Kid' began as a poem and in 1970 . . . In total the play appeared to be a dangerous mixture of the bland, the pretentious and the banal, and it was a mixture that proved its undoing. Yet there were some good things in it as well . . .