[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 Monsters and Rat Jelly], as well as 19 new poems. The 1967 pieces are precocious and sometimes good; those of 1973 are often very good; most of the new ones are a joy. Never a bad poet, Ondaatje has grown to be one of the finest in a country where reputation rarely depends on the sheer quality of work. He has always had a gift for the killing image; now there is a richness, a mellowness, an alertness to complicated truths. Though "we wear sentimentality like a curse" there is no excuse for shunning emotion. Poems about his wife, friends and children are sprinkled throughout, and recently Ondaatje has begun to face directly his vanished Asian childhood. A visit to India and Ceylon in 1978 inspired some of the keenest poems in the book. He has learned how to unsettle without resorting to the Gothic bravado and gore that occasionally stains his prose.
The trick is to appear relaxed and intense at once. Even when Ondaatje is harshly evoking pain, a sense of humor almost never deserts him. Sometimes he rambles from tale to tale, yet the endings have a cunning elegance: In the movies of my childhood the heroes / after skilled sword play and moral victories / leave with absolutely nothing / to do for the rest of their lives. This is the poetry of daily speech, a poetry of the myths by which we live. The trick is to cut away the vanities with words as haunting as memory. Ondaatje has learned what to do. (p. 63)
Mark Abley, "Bone Beneath Skin," in Maclean's Magazine (© 1979 by Maclean's Magazine; reprinted by permission), Vol. 92, No. 17, April 23, 1979, pp. 62-3.
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