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Version 1.0
Epub ISBN 9781448112821
www.randomhouse.co.uk
Published by Jonathan Cape 2011
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Copyright © Michael Ondaatje 2011
Michael Ondaatje has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
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First published in Great Britain in 2011 by
Jonathan Cape
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London SW1V 2SA
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9780224093804
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Michael Ondaatje
Dedication
Title Page
A Gentleman Compares His Virtue …
The Distance of a Shout
Buried
The Brother Thief
To Anuradhapura
The First Rule of Sinhalese Architecture
The Medieval Coast
Buried 2
The Nine Sentiments
Flight
Wells
The Siyabaslakara
Driving with Dominic …
Death at Kataragama
The Great Tree
The Story
House on a Red Cliff
Step
Last Ink
Notes & Acknowledgements
Copyright
for Rosalin Perera
‘For the long nights you lay awake
And watched for my unworthy sake:
For your most comfortable hand
That led me through the uneven land …’
Coming through Slaughter
In the Skin of a Lion
The English Patient
Anil’s Ghost
Divisadero
The Cat’s Table
The Dainty Monsters
The Man with 7 Toes
The Collected Works of Billy the Kid
Rat Jelly
Elimination Dance
There’s a Trick with a Knife I’m Learning to Do
Tin Roof
Secular Love
The Cinnamon Peeler
The Long Poem Anthology
Running in the Family
From Ink Lake: Canadian Stories
The Brick Reader (with Linda Spalding)
An H in the Heart (with B. P. Nichol and George Bowering)
Lost Classics (with Michael Redhill, Esta Spalding and Linda Spalding)
The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film
The poems in Handwriting, Michael Ondaatje’s most recent collection, are memories of Sri Lanka: the rituals and traditions, history and geography, the smells and tastes and colours of his first home. Here are sunless forests, cattle-bells, stilt-walkers ‘with the movement of prehistoric birds’; a Buddha buried ‘so roots/like fingers of a blind monk/spread for two hundred years over his face’; saffron and panic seed, lotus flowers, sandalwood; a lover, who lay ‘her fearless heart/light as a barn owl/against him all night’.
Handwriting