Secular Love

Neil Querengesser taught in the Department of English, University of Calgary, Alberta.

Michael Ondaatje’s ninth book offers a breathtaking sweep of the poet’s imagination. Although many of the selections in Secular Love have been previously published, they fit together in this collection like pieces of an epic journey through a single consciousness. The four sections of this book — “Claude Glass,” “Tin Roof,” “Rock Bottom,” and “Skin Boat” — are best read as consecutive movements of a unified composition. There is a definite progression from the drunken stumblings toward a vision of clarity in “Claude Glass” to the solidly affirmative paragraphs of “Escarpment,” the final poem. Holding together all these fragments is the poet’s powerful voice, the modulations of which are wonderful to hear. Compare, for example, the surrealistic weaving together of the drunken senses and the natural landscape in “Claude Glass”:

with the quiet recreation of an early morning conversation “in a double outhouse”:

“Inner Tube,” “Pacific Letter,” “Bessie Smith at Roy Thomson Hall,” and “In a Yellow Room” are just a few of the many other poems that display the virtuosity of Ondaatje’s voice. There is also a richness in the images and in the telling of tales through poetry that makes one want to return to this work again and again.