Ragas of Longing: The Poetry of Michael Ondaatje

Douglas Barbour is a professor of English at the University of Alberta.
He is the author of Lyric/anti-lyric : Essays on Contemporary Poetry,
Breath Takes, and Fragmenting Body Etc.

A long-time fan and critic of Michael Ondaatje’s writing, Sam Solecki
edited the first major collection of criticism of Ondaatje’s work,
Spider Blues, in 1985. In Ragas of Longing, he has set himself the task
of writing a critical reading of Ondaatje’s collections of poems, from
his first book, The Dainty Monsters, through the man with seven toes,
Rat Jelly, There’s a Trick with a Knife I’m Learning to Do, and
Secular Love, to Handwriting. Solecki has made the interesting decision
to read the poetry with as little reference to the fiction as possible;
in that sense he is right to say that this is the first book to study
Ondaatje’s poetry in this way (it is not the first book to study
Ondaatje’s oeuvre).

There is much to admire in this book, although some readers might find
Solecki’s approach problematic in various aspects. He argues, quite
rightly, that “Ondaatje’s personal ‘canon’ ... [i]s an evolving
one in which each book of poems builds on its predecessor while
simultaneously preparing for the following, often quite different
volume.” But his approach seems to take far too monolithically the
concept that “his career as a poet has what might be called a deep
narrative and a certain narrative trajectory that is best studied, [and]
most obvious, when the books are read in chronological order.”
There’s nothing wrong with this approach, really, until it becomes
clear that Solecki will also “foreground the evolution of Ondaatje’s
treatment of himself and what one might call his family romance. The
presence of the life in the work will be one of the threads holding the
book together.”

That there is a writing of the family romance in a lot of Ondaatje’s
poems and books is something with which many readers would agree, but
that one can so easily match this writing to his own life is open to
argument. Ragas of Longing is an often interesting collection of essays
on Ondaatje’s books of poetry, with some intriguing readings of
individual poems; it is not the final word on them.