A Whorl of Poetry

Index of Authors

A Trick With A Knife

Michael Ondaatje has written at least the following books:

Fiction: Anil's Ghost The English Patient Running in the Family In the Skin of Lion Non-Fiction: Elimination Dance (1978)

Poems: Handwriting The Cinnamon Peeler Secular Love Tin Roof There's a Trick with a Knife I'm Learning to Do Rat Jelly (1973) The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970) The Man With Seven Toes (1969) The Dainty Monsters (1967)

There are the poems of Campion I never saw till now and Wyatt who loved with the best and suddenly I want 16th century women round me devious politic aware of step ladders to the king Tonight I am alone with dogs and lightning aroused by Wyatt's talk of women who step naked into his bedchamber Moonlight and barnlight constant lightning every second minute I have on my thin blue parka and walk behind the asses of the dogs who slide under the gate and sense cattle deep in the fields I look out into the dark pasture past where even the moonlight stops my eyes are against the ink of Campion -- "Farre Off", from There's a Trick With a Knife I'm Learning to Do (1979), p. 80.

Links: There is a collection of Ondaatje links here A bibliography is online here.

Taking It is the formal need to suck blossoms out of the flesh in those we admire planting them private in the brain and cause fruit in lonely gardens. To learn to pour the exact arc of steel still soft and crazy before it hits the page. I have stroked the mood and tone of hundred year dead men and women Emily Dickinson's large dog, Conrad's beard and, for myself, removed them from historical traffic. Having tasted their brain. Or heard the wet sound of a death cough. Their idea of the immaculate moment is now.

The rumours pass on the rumours pass on are planted till they become a spine. -- From Rat Jelly (1973)

The street of the slow moving animals while the sun drops in perfect verticals no wider than boots The dogs sleep their dreams off they are everywhere so that horses on the crowded weekend will step back and snap a leg / while I've been going on the blood from my wrist has travelled to my heart and my fingers touch this soft blue paper notebook control a pencil that shifts up and sideways mapping my thinking going its own way like light wet glasses drifting on polished wood. The acute nerves spark on the periphery of our bodies while the block trunk of us blunders as if we were those sun drugged horses

I am here with the range for everything corpuscle muscle hair hands that need the rub of muscle those senses that that want to crash things with an axe that listen to deep buried veins in our palms those who move in dreams over your women night near you, every paw, the invisible hooves the mind's invisible blackout the intricate never the body's waiting rut.

--From The Collected Works of Billy The Kid (1970)

A House Divided This midnight breathing heaves with no sensible rhythm, is fashioned by no metronome. Your body, eager for the extra yard of bed, reconnoitres and outflanks; I bend in peculiar angles. This nightly battle is fought with subtleties: you got pregnant, I'm sure, just for extra ground --immune from kicks now. Inside you now's another, thrashing like a fish, swinging, fighting for its inch already. --From The Dainty Monsters (1967)

into the plain; passed a body rotting in the sun. Don't look, he says, the third thing for miles around. Don't look! lost my knife. Threw the thing at a dog and it ran away, the blade in its head. Sometimes I don't believe what's going on. --From The Man With Seven Toes (1969)