Thanks to NetGalley and Knopf for the ARC!

I loved this collection. I was reminded of poems by Li-Young Lee and Louise Glück—the way small moments become sacred if they are treated as such.

Intimacy is often built on imagined shared futures—the closeness afforded by co-creating the world. Michael Ondaatje's "A Year of Last Things" instead reflects on the intimacy of shared histories, both real and imagined.

The resulting poems are quiet as everything other than love becomes non-essential. Time is merely an approximation, and the fact of what happened matters less than its emotional truth. As such, eros hums just beneath the surface of every line, often in unexpected ways. These are some of the most romantic poems I’ve read in a long time. Consider, for example, the following stanza from “The Then”:

"All that history until we met
in furious chaos when I loved first
your face, then loved how you
had become what you were"

In the way that it’s impossible to fully understand home without traveling, the collection hones in on its intimacies by constantly expanding its globetrotting scope. The landscape becomes so cluttered with significant sites that the poems become displaced—they could only be a sort of dream. Similarly, the constant appearance of other artists and historical figures calls attention to the narrator’s preoccupation with memory. Who are these people apart from how they are remembered? Who are we aside from our relationships with others?

I think the following line from the prose poem “Winchester House” conveys the clearest picture of the book’s impetus:

"It was that further intimacy that comes with trusting a fiction, a non-personal truth, going towards what you do not yet know. You will not even remember writing it."

Ultimately, this is a collection that feels like someone quietly recalling their life while sharing stories on a porch. These are moments that have been told and re-told, and nothing is lost by re-mediating life through memory. Instead, it all becomes a little truer with each iteration.

Although I've never read any of Michael Ondaatje's novels, I know they're very famous and highly praised. So it's a little funny how out of *all* the novels he's written, the first thing I've ever read from him is this poetry collection.

Overall, I adore this collection. The opening poems "Lock," "Definition," and "5 A.M" are stunning. We follow Ondaatje through his youth and through his travels, through the poems he half remembers and through the people he fell in love with. There is a nostaglic air to everything, making the whole collection seem like a wise old man telling stories about his well-lived life. However, some of the poems were clunky, perhaps due to Ondaatje's relative inexeperience to this form of writing. A wonderful, tender read nonetheless.

Thank you to NetGalley and Knopf for my eARC. All thoughts were my own.

Michael Ondaatje is one of my immediate read authors - anything he writes, I will read. This latest collection of poetry does not disappoint, and it was a gentle, nostalgic read. My immediate thoughts after finishing the book, was this felt like an archive of art and memory. (Although one can argue perhaps that is just what an archive is). The poems flow together like the streams, estuaries, and rivers he frequently evokes in this collection. Not only do these poems speak about a journey into the past and memory, but also journey across the globe from Japan, England, Sri Lanka, to the Holland Tunnel in New York and the bus to Fez. Although there is the theme of loss and death and moving beyond, I felt grounded and directed with each poem. Ondaatje guides through his poems by invoking and interspersing his own poems with references to films, music, and other writers. He writes within a larger tradition that traces back thousands of years, his language an echo of the language of others.
I thought this collection to be stunning and provocative in a tender way, imbued with a sense of time and memory and nostalgia. There is a sense of tenderness towards the pass, but also a fear and longing for it. As with his many other wonderful works, this did not disappoint.

From one of the most influential writers of his generation, a surprising poetry collection about memory, history, and the act of looking back.

There were pieces of this collection that I found gorgeous and quite emotionally charged. There were others (enough to outweigh the good) that felt clunky. The prose was so thick, it felt like chewing on a fatty piece of steak that could never be fully digested.

I felt that it was too flowery where it didn't need to be in places. There were also parts that were so uniquely written they immediately evoked feeling.