Description: The exquisite poems collected in Handwriting -- Michael Ondaatje's first book of new poems since The Cinnamon Peeler -- recall "the vista of a life." Drawing on history, mythology, landscape, and personal memories of Sri Lanka, Michael Ondaatje weaves a rich tapestry of images that evoke desire for -- and anguish over -- scents and gestures of lost loves, homes, and language. The verses, at tums spare and luminous, demonstrate the poet's unique artistry as he contemplates "the mirror world of art" in a time before books, when "handwriting occurred on waves, / on leaves, the scripts of smoke, " recounts medieval monks "burying the Buddha in stone" amid the battle fire of war, and remembers a woman's "laughter with its / intake of breath. Uhh huh."

Crafted with lyrical delicacy and seductive power, Handwriting reminds us of Michael Ondaatje's stature as one of the finest poets writing today.

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