Handwriting: Poems
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 inThe English Patient, which earned him the Booker Prize in 1992--will find the same lyrical genius in his verse. In his 10th 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 the gesture of meditation... roots / like the fingers of a blind monk / spread for two hundred years over his face." As the title suggests,Handwritingis an elegiac tribute to the ancients who in "wild cursive scripts... spent all their years / writing one good book"; whose "physical yearning / became permanent" and "desire became devotional." 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 poetry's healing powers in times of strife:The brush of sandalwood along a collarboneGreen dark silkA shoe lefton the cadju tree terracethese nights when "pools arereduced by constant plungings"Meanwhile a man's burning hearthis palate completely dryon the Galapitigala Roadthinking there is water in that forestOndaatje's 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, Amazon.co.uk--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.