Michael Ondaatje’s A Year of Last Things is a quiet, reflective read that feels like flipping through an old photo album—one filled with half-remembered stories, gentle observations, and moments that catch you off guard with their emotional weight.

The writing is soft and poetic, not in a showy way, but in a way that invites you to slow down and sit with it. Ondaatje doesn’t follow a straight line; instead, he moves through memories and thoughts like someone walking through a familiar room in the dark—carefully, tenderly, and with a lot of feeling.

There’s a sense of calm in the way he writes about loss, time, and change. It’s a book that doesn’t try to tie everything up neatly, but that’s part of its beauty. It feels honest and real, like a conversation with someone who’s lived a full life and is still figuring things out.

If you like books that are thoughtful, a little melancholic, and beautifully written, A Year of Last Things is one to take your time with

This is one of those "hybrid" collections of poems, prose, and a short story with an embedded poem, that some editors currently say they want to see. The title comes from a single poem. If there's a unifying theme, it's reminiscing, and a summary might be "It's good to grow old well-educated and well-travelled." Locations shift around the globe, sometimes within a poem, and when a time setting is clear it's in the twentieth century. Topics are mostly literature, art, music, and landscapes, with the only remotely controversial topic being the now generally accepted idea that schools allowed too much corporal punishment in the early twentieth century. (And even this statement is credited to an obscure deceased poet; just as you're about to look him up, the author mentions in the afternote that he's a fictional character, though based on another obscure twentieth century poet.) If you enjoy listening to the reminiscences of people who think more about books and paintings than about people, you'll enjoy this book; I did. The observations of Eastern Orthodox ikons (in two poems) were new to me and seem particularly keen.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC digital copy. I was not compensated for this review and all opinions are my own.

Unfortunately, I allowed the book to be archived before I could download it.

A Year of Last Things by Michael Ondaatje is a beautiful collection from a beautiful writer. It's a tender meditation on love, loss, and memory. His poems are not the always the quick reads that some might be used to, but there are some tender lines that will stay with me.

Many thanks to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for sharing this book with me.

This was a very thought-provoking read. It reminded me of something I would have been assigned to read in a college poetry class, and I think it would be a wonderful pick for that. It felt accessible and not overly self-indulgent like poetry so easily can.

Thank you to the publisher for sending me a finished copy of this book.

Michael Ondaatje gifted us all with a book of poetry and prose that I was thrilled to dig into. Some of the poetry melted me, causing me to pause and take a moment to absorb what I had just read. Some of the poetry felt a bit confusing (for me, I'm sure it's me). The prose was a challenge at times feeling clunky and too needlessly complex. That aside, I still enjoyed it and hope you pick this one up.

The Year of last Things by Michael Ondaajte has an elegiac sense of things, as one might expect from the title. The poems here are often a look back into the speaker’s past, a questioning at times of possible different paths (though rarely if ever any sense of regret, just difference), or, more bluntly, a recitation of grief at the passing of a friend, a pet.

You can see it in the opening poem, “Lock”, which with the speaker
“Reading the lines he loves/he slips them into a pocket/wishes to die with his clothes/full of torn free stanzas/and the telephone numbers/of his children in far cities”. Or recollecting “how I loved that lock when I saw it/all those summers ago.” Or in the mention of a dog bowl that lands with more impact later in the collection. There are lots of echoes like that throughout the collection: friends, that lock, animals that die, maps and travel. Time passing, people and animals passing are omnipresent themes as well. A number of poems also have a deep intimacy about them, as if we’re eavesdropping or peeking in a window.

Ondaajte moves between more traditional poetic line breaks/forms and more prose poems, almost mini-essays. He also shows good control of sound, as in the above lines, employing the alliteration, consonance, assonance, and near rhyme to create the musicality: “lines/loves, loves/pocket, love/lock, saw/all.”

As is true of nearly every collection, not every poem hit for me. Sometimes I felt like the poems were too intimate, that I was kept outside the inner circle a bit too much. Others sometimes felt a bit flat. But the successful poems certainly outnumbered the less successful ones, and even those added the cumulative bittersweet sense of times’ passage that lends the book a power and allows it to linger for some time in the reader’s mind.

Much like life, of which this collection is a sort of scrapbook, this title was a real mixed bag. There were poems I found so sweet and moving. Poems that felt tender and intimate. But then there were poems that probably went right over my head with references to works and artists I am unfamiliar with. They weren’t bad, they just weren’t meaningful to me.

There were a few poems I lingered over to savor, but overall I was sort of rushing through this collection to get to something I would enjoy more.

Thank you to Knopf and NetGalley for the e-ARC though!

It was a thought provoking, enjoyable read. I was fortunate enough to receive a physical copy as well, and I’ve already given it to a friend to read! I know she will enjoy it as well.

Mr. Ondaatje has long been one of my favorite authors. The English Patient and Warlight are both on my "best books of all time list." What I did not realize (and should have) was that Ondaatje is also a poet. So when I had the opportunity to get a digital copy in advance, I jumped!

The poems are really lovely. Really. Lovely. With this collection of poems Ondaatje takes you with him through the journeys of his life. I read this book through at least three times before putting it down. I have only the digital version, but I will be purchasing a hard copy to keep at my desk. His words are sometimes just the thing to complete your day.

I highly recommend!

I would like to thank Netgalley, Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor for the digital copy of this book! It was published March 19th (and would be a great thing to pick up for National Poetry Month!)

Narrative, accessible voice and sensory-rich details throughout this collection. Would recommend to poetry students.

I have always considered Ondaatje a poetic writer--his lyricism is one of the things I love best about his fiction and nonfiction--though I have never read his poetry before. Some of these poems worked very well for me, and others felt cramped or restricted by their form and seemed to want to become something longer and fuller. The poems I connected to the most were the elegies for other writers and especially the poems about writer's portraits or last moments--that sounds grim, and indeed the poem title that was chosen as the title of this collection was a fair selection based on mood--but these were beautiful and haunting. I do recommend this collection, and I enjoyed it overall, but I'm not sure every poem will connect with every reader.

Thanks to the publisher, the author, and Netgalley for my free earc. My opinions are all my own.

I think some of the poems can be thought provoking and resonate with people of different age groups. Unfortunately I don't think poetry is a genre I really enjoy. So for me personally some parts were hard to get through since I didn't understand the deeper meaning.

Writing that feels so personal and universal at the same time. I didn't know what to expect going into these pieces as I've never interacted with the writer before but I was blown away.

A beautifully moving, poignant, and thought-provoking collection of poems. I went into this one not knowing exactly what to expect and having never read any of Ondaatje's previous works, but left satisfied and with plenty to ponder more deeply on. As such, I definitely plan on rectifying my latter statement and look forward to reading more of Ondaatje's past and future works moving forward.

3.5 stars
Read this on a long plane ride... which was a very worthwhile use of my time. Whenever I start to think I'm well-read, I pick up a book like this and feel like my grasp of literature is much less firm than I'd imagined. I definitely missed a lot of references here—had to look up some words and people as I read—but I bookmarked several poems to go back to and read again. I particularly enjoyed the more personal stories of Ondaatje's upbringing, and all poems related to that. He packs some intense emotion into a compact volume.

This was okay. The poetry is nice, and I like his writing. I just wasn’t feeling it. I think poetry is such a personal experience that it’s hard to articulate why it does or doesn’t resonate.

I have not read anything by Ondaatje in years, the last being Anil's Ghost. This collection of poems and short prose pieces is a wonderful re-introduction. There is an elegiac, reflective quality to these seemingly highly autobiographical pieces. It's hard to describe the mood, but the sense is of a world gone by, with a very post-colonial feel. There are some striking images, such as a description of a gentle English birder describing birdsong a few days before his death in WW1.

There is a depth to the recollection here, a distillation of a widely traveled and widely read life. A very enjoyable read.

Thanks to the publisher for this ARC through NetGalley

What poetry will move us is a very individual thing. For me, Walt Whitman saved my life by reaching across time and letting me know I had worth, value, that my life is sacred at a time when I felt none of those things. Later, I was moved deeply by Mary Oliver's wild geese, as so many people have been. I was enchanted with Alan Ginsberg's poem about meeting Whitman in a supermarket. This book, on the other hand, did not move me or engage me deeply or hardly at all.

It seemed to be a kind of academic poetry with sprinkled cultural references here and there. More clever and intellectual than gritty and heart felt. I am sure some people will love this book, and perhaps think me a fool for not appreciating it Yet as the cliche goes, art is in the eye of the beholder and so, perhaps, are poetry books.

"A Year of Last Things" by Michael Ondaatje is a beautiful book of poems that talk about feelings like love, sadness, and how time passes. Ondaatje writes in a way that makes you feel every emotion, and his words paint pictures in your mind. Each poem is like a little story that makes you think about life. This book shows how good Ondaatje is at his craft, and it's definitely worth checking out if you like poetry or just want to feel something deep.