The Cinnamon Peeler

Bert Almon is a professor of English at the University of Alberta and
author of Calling Texas.

A selected poems by Michael Ondaatje will always be welcome, but at the
same time anything but a collected poems will lead to dissatisfaction.
This volume reprints a selection from Ondaatje’s early collections and
all of his Secular Love, with the “Elimination Dances” (bagatelles,
really, but entertaining) as an interlude in the middle. The early poems
have clearly been slighted for the sake of the later work. Ondaatje’s
remarkable first book, The Dainty Monsters, is represented by only 12 of
its 46 poems, and the lengthy anthology piece “Peter” has been
omitted. The poems in Secular Love are more diffuse than the early work,
and the confessional mode is not as interesting as the power and wit of
the early work, but it is reasonable for a poet to represent his latest
efforts in full.

This elegantly produced book provides an excellent introduction to
Ondaatje’s lean, confident, image-laden poems. He writes with
tremendous lyric skill and a dazzling precision of imagery. Perhaps the
best adjective for his tone is authoritative. He can write about any
subject—Greek mythology, suburban life, love affairs, Sri Lanka, King
Kong, and Wallace Stevens—with confidence and conviction. Along with
the humor and the passion is a steady awareness of human suffering that
underlies the more ecstatic moments. The last of his “Elimination
Dances” calls on “anyone with pain” to sit down, and that clears
the floor, as he well knows.