A Year of Last Things

From one of the most influential writers of this generation, a gorgeous and most of all surprising poetry collection about memory, love, and the act of looking back.

Following several of his internationally acclaimed, beloved novels, A Year of Last Things is Michael Ondaatje’s long-awaited return to poetry. In pieces that are sometimes wittily funny, moving, and always wise, we journey back through time by way of alchemical leaps, unearthing writings by revered masters, moments of shared tenderness, and abandoned landscapes we hold onto to rediscover the influence of every border crossed.

Moving from a Sri Lankan boarding school to Moliere's chair during his last stage performance, to Bulgarian churches and their icons, to a California coast, and his beloved Canadian rivers, Michael Ondaatje casts a brilliant eye that merges his past and present, in the way memory and the distant shores of art and lost friends continue to influence all that surrounds him.

As in this startling passage 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 my 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 Slaviansky Bazaar Hotel in Lady with a Dog
     where Dmitri imagines their dark but hopeful future.
     The Hotel du Grand Miroir in Brussels where Baudelaire
     lived his last few months. (A decade later
     Verlaine shot Rimbaud there.)
    The Casa Verdi in Milan where retired opera singers were welcome
     along with the various heteronyms of Fernando Pessoa in their afterlife.