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 in Ondaatje's writing toward more experimental and personal poetry.

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 Billy “seeks or imposes order in the external world to compensate for a disintegrating inner world.”

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 “performance” of personal, familial, and community identity.

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, observing a heightened sensitivity toward gender relations in Ondaatje's later work.

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 Slaughter, Running in the Family, and In the Skin of a Lion.

In the following interview, which was conducted in 1978, Ondaatje discusses his poetry, particularly the creative process.

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.”

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.

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 past for the returning expatriate.

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,” Ondaajte “deftly objectifies the artist's dilemma by representing him as ‘court monster’ in a fairy tale setting.”

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 shows evidence of Ondaajte's brilliant visual imagination and his auditory sensitivity to the musical possibilities of free verse.”

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 industry.

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 madness, then Michael Ondaatje's work could be said to carry this movement to a further, darker extreme. For here there is virtually no intimation of the possibility of return or reintegration, of transcendence or the possible achievement of community (or even a more than momentary communication), at least for the author's doom...

[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 process, built up by various means, and he indicates in several ways the degree to which he is presenting a legendary or poetic image of the Kid. There is, for instance, the concern with photographs. The book opens with an account of photography at the time of Billy's life, indicating the difficulty (which is also Ondaatje's) of...

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.

In the following review, Merritt compares the historical themes and narrative elements of Handwriting with those of Running in the Family.

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 his poetry, arguing “It is jarring… to go from the confessional poems of anguished, passionate love to the more mundane ones of friendship and fatherly love.”

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 appear since Margaret Avison's Winter Sun. Michael Ondaatje represents a healthy reaction in modern Canadian poetry. Although a completely contemporary writer, he eschews the "simple", almost barren, style of so many of the poets influenced by the Black Mountain group. He owes much of his originality to his background, I think. The exotic imagery which crowds the pages of this book appears to stem from his childhood memories of ...

In the following review, Sen offers a positive assessment of Handwriting, lauding the poetics, tone, and themes of the collection.

In the following review, O'Neill assesses the technique, language, and themes of Handwriting.

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, casually understated material of [The Collected Works of Billy the Kid]. Negotiating this book, I sensed a sure-footedness, a control which I have never felt in Ondaatje's earlier books. Indeed, if he hadn't used the historic framework of the adventures of Mrs. Fraser (The Man With Seven Toes) in a manner somewhat prophetic of his s...

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 cry, I thought when I began it, from a cycle of poems about Billy the Kid, or a prose poem on the New Orleans jazz scene and cornetist Buddy Bolden. Not so far a cry, it turns out. But how does it seem different? First, it has the flavour of autobiography. Of course the narrative "I" is always present in Ondaatje's wor...

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 most of its readers. The book conflates descriptions of two separate visits to Sri Lanka, where Ondaatje was born and lived for the early part of his childhood. Significantly, the country is always referred to as "Ceylon" in his text, for this is very much an exploration of times past, a way of life that has all but irrevocably van...

Michael Ondaatje … has set himself apart from [the dogmatic certainty of much mainstream Canadian writing]. He works by suggesting the final unknowability of the world. He disrupts comforting pieties and surrounds his characters with an almost absolute darkness. His urgent interest has always been to drive the reader away from familiar settings and expected motivations. What he seems to want is to maximize our terror of, and fascination with, our own ignorance. As protagonists, he favours the "...

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 Lanka, formerly Ceylon], visiting those members of his family who remain there. Interspersed with his own experiences are chapters that forage through time to recreate the vanished world of his grandparents and parents. By entering the darkness of history, Ondaatje hopes against hope to bring his father to light. Opening the pages at random, ...

[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 killi...

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," he writes, "the slight silver key to unlock it, to dig it out. Here then is a maze to begin, be in." And from that promising starting point he pries Billy the Kid loose from his legend and takes us inside, to his inner being; we feel as Billy feels…. [It] is through Billy's (or Mr. Ondaatje's) special sensitivi...

["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 of spectral music it seems to need. It's a poetry that mixes the bizarre and commonplace, but its accents are prosaic: "I have been seeing dragons again." And in another poem, "We are in a cell of civilized magic." There's a witty poem spoken through the persona of a young Queen Elizabeth I, and another ab...

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'm Learning To Do: Poems, 1963–1978] are rather lusterless, straining even for their whimsical gestures. He assumes an amusing offcenterness—"The beautiful formed things caught at the wrong moment"—but having invented 31 similes for a child's unmusical voice, he has brought us no nearer that voi...

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 populated by horrifying figures and events. It's a fashionable track, and any number of aspirants can turn out a glum swatch of verse given a dead animal or nightmare inspired by an anchovy pizza. Yet Ondaatje rises above the usual muck with an aggressively inventive, if sometimes offhanded, flourish. His freshness creates its own season of ...