Ragas of longing : the poetry of Michael Ondaatje / Sam Solecki.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Solecki suggests that Ondaatje's poetry can be seen as constituting a relatively unified personal canon that has evolved with each book building on its predecessor while simultaneously preparing the groundwork for the following volume.

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CHOICE Review

Most Ondaatje criticism focuses on his fiction at the expense of his other literary output. Solecki (Univ. of Toronto) sets out to balance the record in this first book-length study of Ondaatje's poetry. Ondaatje's popular novels (e.g., The English Patient, 1992; Anil's Ghost, 2000) overshadow the creative accomplishment evidenced in his six volumes of poetry, and Solecki contends that each volume bears the stamp of Ondaatje's verbal originality and explores new ranges of human experience, while an overarching myth unifies and makes coherent the disparate worlds conjured in the imagistic and metaphoric verse. The myth speaks to the lost innocence of a young man, isolated on an island and compelled to confront the chaos of personal existence. Solecki points out Ondaatje's debt to British poet Edwin Muir (the subject of Ondaatje's master's thesis); like Muir, Ondaatje uses myth to avoid the sentimentality of the subjective and the confessional. In addition to Muir (who is never mentioned in Ondaatje's writing), Solecki cites other literary precursors: Kafka, Stevens, Yeats, Auden, Garcia Marquez, Leonard Cohen. Solecki devotes a chapter to each volume of poetry, offering detailed and comprehensive discussion, subtle, intelligent reading, and jargon-free and convincing discussions of literary quality. ^BSumming Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. M. Butovsky emeritus, Concordia University