Winner of two Governor General's awards for poetry, Michael Ondaatje is one of the most brilliant and acclaimed of that impressive group of Canadian poets who first published in the 1960s, a group that includes Margaret Atwood, Gwen MacEwen, and B. P. Ni...

Once a highly regarded denizen of a burgeoning Canadian literary scene in the early 1970s, Michael Ondaatje (born 1943) has since gone on to achieve international renown for his poetry and fiction. His 1992 novel, The English Patient, was made into a mot...

A few years ago, Kentucky-born poet and playwright Naomi Wallace was driving past the Fischer Packing Plant in Louisville, a slaughterhouse where farm animals are transformed into various cuts of meat -- prime rib, porterhouse, hamburger and dog food. At the time, the employees...

THEY appeared from nowhere, performed their grisly slaughter, then vanished to the call of a bugle. It was the moment when a rural pursuit encroached on urban life - and horrified residents who witnessed it. Locals were alerted by a cacophony...

In the following essay, Jones traces the diverse ways the conventions of detective fiction and biography converge in Coming through Slaughter, demonstrating the appropriation of both genres by Ondaatje's postmodern narrative strategies.

The protagonist of Coming Through Slaughter is Buddy Bolden, known chiefly to jazz aficionados as a pioneering musician in turn-of-the-century New Orleans. Bolden is a hazy, semi-mythological figure at the dawning of jazz—from the days before recordings or big money or national and international acceptance of Black music. (pp. 92-3) From these fragments and an acquaintanceship with New Orleans and its history, Ondaatje has fashioned a prose work (his first) that is part documentary, part fiction and ...

To his acknowledgments at the end of Coming Through Slaughter, Michael Ondaatje adds this final note: "While I have used real names and characters and historical situations I have also used more personal pieces of friends and fathers. There have been some date changes, some characters brought together, and some facts that have been expanded or polished to suit the truth of fiction." He indicates here the intricate mingling of fact, fiction, and personal reference through which he records and i...