A Year of Last Things
Poems
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A Year of Last Things
Narrated by:
Michael Ondaatje
Buy Now for £7.99
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Narrated by:
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Michael Ondaatje
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By:
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Michael Ondaatje
Summary
Following several of his internationally acclaimed novels, A Year of Last Things is Michael Ondaatje’s long-awaited return to poetry. In pieces that are sometimes witty, sometimes moving, and always wise, we journey back through time by way of alchemical leaps, unearthing writings by revered masters, moments of shared tenderness, and the abandoned landscapes we hold on to to rediscover the influence of every border crossed.
Moving from a Sri Lankan boarding school to Molière’s chair during his last stage performance, to Bulgarian churches and their icons, to the California coast and his beloved Canadian rivers, Michael Ondaatje casts a brilliant eye that merges memory with the present, in the way memory as the distant shores of art and lost friends continue to influence everything that surrounds him.
From his poem "His chair, a narrow bed, a motel room, the fox":
At the Hacienda Motel in Los Angeles Sam Cooke was shot dead.
‘See that shadow on the wall . . .’ All those motels and hotels
in literature and song, where X wrote this,
where Y got drunk, where Z overdosed.
The one Hank Williams was driven past, dead already in his car.
The Slavianski Bazaar Hotel in "The Lady with a Dog,"
where Dmitri imagines their dark but hopeful future.
The Hôtel de ville de Courtrai,where Verlaine shot Rimbaud.
The Casa Verdi in Milan, where retired opera singers were welcomed
along with various heteronyms of Fernando Pessoa in their afterlife.
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Critic reviews
“A Year of Last Things focuses squarely on themes common in Ondaatje’s fiction, offering gentle meditations on love, loss, territory, memory and impermanence. . . . No other author is as capable of subtly and convincingly telescoping private moments into universal myths.”
—Marek Sullivan, Times Literary Supplement
“Each new book of Michael Ondaatje’s is a literary event, but that is particularly true for his books of poetry. In A Year of Last Things he comes close to writing something like a timeless poem, ‘a memory poem’ that reflects outside and inside time at the same moment, recording the mercurial, mysterious feeling of being alive. The poems become intimate, unresolved stories, loyal to feeling and presence, the lyricism of dreams applied to narratives of lives and landscapes. A Year of Last Things is a remarkable, incomparable new collection.”
—Terrance Hayes, author of So to Speak
“Dazzling . . . This collection radiates the joy of a fully realized, literary life.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred
“Forgiveness, memory, and the vicissitudes of love are among the recurring themes of A Year of Last Things, Michael Ondaatje’s exceptional new collection of poetry . . . [Ondaatje’s return to poetry] is welcome, as he demonstrates yet again that he is a master of the genre.”
—BookPage, starred
“A poetry collection in which we ‘journey back through time by way of alchemical leaps, unearthing writings by revered masters, moments of shared tenderness, and the abandoned landscapes we hold on to to rediscover the influence of every border crossed.’”
—Lit Hub, “Most Anticipated Books of 2024”
—Marek Sullivan, Times Literary Supplement
“Each new book of Michael Ondaatje’s is a literary event, but that is particularly true for his books of poetry. In A Year of Last Things he comes close to writing something like a timeless poem, ‘a memory poem’ that reflects outside and inside time at the same moment, recording the mercurial, mysterious feeling of being alive. The poems become intimate, unresolved stories, loyal to feeling and presence, the lyricism of dreams applied to narratives of lives and landscapes. A Year of Last Things is a remarkable, incomparable new collection.”
—Terrance Hayes, author of So to Speak
“Dazzling . . . This collection radiates the joy of a fully realized, literary life.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred
“Forgiveness, memory, and the vicissitudes of love are among the recurring themes of A Year of Last Things, Michael Ondaatje’s exceptional new collection of poetry . . . [Ondaatje’s return to poetry] is welcome, as he demonstrates yet again that he is a master of the genre.”
—BookPage, starred
“A poetry collection in which we ‘journey back through time by way of alchemical leaps, unearthing writings by revered masters, moments of shared tenderness, and the abandoned landscapes we hold on to to rediscover the influence of every border crossed.’”
—Lit Hub, “Most Anticipated Books of 2024”
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