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. Hi...
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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 tha...
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In the following essay, Kanaganayakam examines the representation of Sri Lankan culture in Running in the Family, discussing the personal and collective implications of the nation's colonial pa...
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In the following review, Sen offers a positive assessment of Handwriting, lauding the poetics, tone, and themes of the collection.
Michael Ondaatje's new collection of poems, Handwriting, his f...
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In the following essay, Matthews connects the autobiographical elements of Running in the Family with conventional dramatic techniques in order to demonstrate the work's ritualized “perf...
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In the following review, Merritt compares the historical themes and narrative elements of Handwriting with those of Running in the Family.
As in his 1982 memoir Running in the Family, the subject and ...
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In the following interview, Ondaatje discusses his decision to profile film editor Walter Murch in The Conversations, drawing comparisons between the processes of film editing and fiction writing.
Can...
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In the following essay, Bök discusses the sociopolitical implications of the glamorized violence that characterizes the male protagonists of The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Coming through...
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In the following excerpt, Dunne examines Ondaatje's discussions with Walter Murch in The Conversations, detailing the contributions of Murch and other film and sound editors to the movie indust...
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In the following essay, York investigates the thematic importance of gender issues—particularly as they relate to questions of ownership—in Ondaatje's poetry and fiction, observin...
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In the following review, O'Neill assesses the technique, language, and themes of Handwriting.
When Hana plays the piano in Michael Ondaatje's novel The English Patient, she is described ...
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Critical Essay by Douglas Barbour
[The Dainty Monsters] is the finest first book of poems to appear since Margaret Avison's Winter Sun. Michael Ondaatje represents a healthy reaction in modern ...
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Critical Essay by Andreas Schroeder
The many lamely constructed similes of Dainty Monsters and the often lurid lyric excesses of The Man With Seven Toes are a far cry from the more carefully crafted, ...
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Critical Essay by Stephen Scobie
[The Collected Works of Billy the Kid] fixes a certain view of the Kid into an intense, fully realized image…. (p. 42)
Ondaatje's mythmaking is a careful...
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Critical Essay by William Logan
Compared to the creative mythologizing of Ondaatje's The Collected Works of Billy the Kid …, his selected poems [in There's a Trick with a Knife I&...
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Critical Essay by G. E. Murray
Michael Ondaatje's poems in There's a Trick With a Knife I'm Learning to Do … use the lyric as a weapon…. [His] landscapes are populat...
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Critical Essay by Charles Molesworth
["There's a Trick with a Knife I'm Learning to Do: Poems 1963–1978" is] filled with odd angles of vision, but it lacks the kind ...
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Critical Essay by Karyl Roosevelt
Michael Ondaatje is a poet and even his prose [in The Collected Works of Billy the Kid] moves with rhythmic, circular precision. "Find the beginning," h...
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Critical Essay by Mark Abley
[There's a Trick with a Knife I'm Learning to Do] contains the best of two of Ondaatje's earlier collections, published in 1967 and 1973 [The Dainty M...
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Critical Essay by Tom Marshall
If [Douglas] LePan's and [Leonard] Cohen's myths have to do with an expedition or descent into darkness, horror, a mystical sensuality, fragmentation, and ...
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Critical Essay by Bharati Mukherjee
Michael Ondaatje … has set himself apart from [the dogmatic certainty of much mainstream Canadian writing]. He works by suggesting the final unknowability of...
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Critical Essay by Mark Abley
Running in the Family … is the bravest, gentlest and funniest of [Ondaatje's] nine books.
The text is centred around a long trip he recently made to [Sri Lan...
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Critical Essay by Gary Draper
Each new book by Michael Ondaatje seems wholly different from those that preceded it, and wholly the same. [Running in the Family] is a family reminiscence…. A far...
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Critical Essay by Christopher Reid
Running in the Family turns out to be an intelligent and responsible piece of work, full of good stories and colourful evocations of a world that will be foreign to ...
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In the following assessment of Dainty Monsters, Barbour praises Ondaatje's natural imagery, subtle narrative, and controlled language.
[The Dainty Monsters] is the finest first book of poems to...
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In the following interview, which was conducted in 1978, Ondaatje discusses his poetry, particularly the creative process.
[Jon Pearce]: When did you start to write? Did you write at all in England wh...
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In the following essay, Solecki offers an explanatory overview of Ondaatje's the man with seven toes, arguing that the collection is “a pivotal book in Ondaatje's development....
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In the essay below, Owens presents a thorough analysis of The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, focusing in particular on the tension between order and disorder in the collection. Owens asserts that B...
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In the following assessment of Secular Love, King-Edwards heralds Ondaatje's break “from reason and control” in the collection, but laments what she perceives as inconsistency in ...
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In the following laudatory evaluation of Secular Love, Solecki describes the collection as “the ruthless and unembarrassed engagement with the self,” adding “Almost every page sho...
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In the essay below, Harding-Russell discusses Ondaajte's handling of both myth and the artist figure in the early poem “Peter.” The critic asserts that, with “Peter,”...
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In the following essay, Wilton analyzes Ondaatje's narrative technique in the man with seven toes, particularly the unconscious and conscious participation of the reader in the text.
The man wi...
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In the following essay, Barbour traces Ondaatje's poetic development from his first collection through There's a Trick with a Knife I'm Learning to Do. Barbour discovers a trend i...
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Michael Ondaatje
(Philip) Michael Ondaatje
