Michael Ondaatje has always been a poet – it is how he began his career 50 years ago – although he is more famous as a novelist and especially for his 1992 Booker prize-winning The English Patient (which also won the Golden Man Booker in 2018). In A Year of Last Things, he is writing about last – and lost – things. He is not interested in the known quantity, has always been more at home with the unknown, and is extraordinarily attuned to hauntings, to the idea that missing pieces are likely to inform whatever remains. The opening poem, Lock, begins:
Reading the lines he loves
he slips them into a pocket,
wishes to die with his clothes
full of torn-free stanzas
