Ragas of Longing: The Poetry of Michael Ondaatje (review)

In his 1999 study of Al Purdy, Sam Solecki expressed his surprise and dismay that his was the first book-length study of 'the major or central poet of our experience.' In the introduction to his study of Michael Ondaatje's poetry, Solecki is 'still surprised' that 'a writer of Ondaatje's stature and reputation' remains 'ignored even by academic critics, the linebackers of poetry's crumbling last line of defence'; Solecki's dismay resurfaces not over the apathetic reception of Ondaatje's poems, but in a lament for the flagging vitality of poetry itself. The problem, Solecki suggests, is that poems are too difficult to treat ideologically or discursively; they resist the dominant critical approaches of contemporary lit crit, focused on 'gender, class, politics and social critique' instead of aesthetics. His study of Ondaatje presents an impressively attentive overview of Ondaatje's poetic corpus, and an affirmation of the value of reading poetry closely and carefully.

Each chapter of Solecki's book focuses on one of Ondaatje's books; earlier versions of five chapters appeared (from 1977 to 2001) in literary periodicals. Arranged chronologically, they follow the publication order of Ondaatje's collections, tracing the development of Ondaatje's poetics - although Solecki asserts that Ondaatje's characteristic vocabulary and themes were in evidence from the beginning. For Solecki, Ondaatje's poetry culminates in Handwriting, a volume in which the poet offsets 'his early figuratively congested style' with a lapidary directness and accepts the confessional imperative he confronted in Secular Love. The chapters are intercut with brief commentaries, each centring on paratext (covers, titles, epigraphs) or context (canon, twice), which disrupt the quasi-biographical chronology by ranging through Ondaatje's work to discover preoccupations and consistencies. Solecki's study thus remains open-ended; he lets Ondaatje have the 'last word,' and offers the poet's commentaries on his work, often despite himself: 'I think it only damages a poem,' Ondaatje says in 1980, 'to have the poet try to explain it.' Nevertheless, Ondaatje remains for Solecki a 'slight silver key' to his work, and the book often relies on Ondaatje's criticism to provide points of departure for Solecki's impressively detailed readings of the poems. For me, Solecki's reliance on the poet is a misstep; his pursuit of 'myth' in Ondaatje's early work misfires - it's unclear what Ondaatje means - and an attempt to uncover an Oedipal struggle akin to Harold Bloom's anxiety of influence remains unconvincing. Still, Solecki hears Ondaatje's lines with tremendous empathy and depth, and is at his best when he guides us through the dulcet violence to spiky caresses of the poems.

The practice of critical guidance is at issue here, as Solecki attends to his own reading practices. In his exegesis of the man with seven toes, Solecki argues that Ondaatje's poems disorient the reader, who 'is compelled to re-examine the nature of his or her relationship to the text and to move more tenatively through it.' The woman in the poems 'moves from one startling and inevitable defamiliarizing event to another.' Folding the literary into the historical creates a troubling euphemism, since Mrs Fraser is not defamiliarized but raped, even if Solecki is merely mimicking Ondaatje's problematic aestheticism; but when this character lapses into 'numbed and passive acceptance,' the reader, so inevitably compelled, is also asked numbly to accept the artful cover-up in Ondaatje's poetry, to convert actual violence into lush 'myth.' Thankfully, Solecki also maps a critical progress, as his dialogue with Ondaatje's poetry develops. The tentative movement he describes as compulsion becomes a more genuine interrogative: 'to be frank,' he comes to admit in the later chapters, he's 'not sure' always what Ondaatje means, and Solecki's style becomes suffused with terms of uncertainty, seeming, and appearance. This isn't a confession of inadequacy, but the admission that readings cannot be compelled, and need to remain open and uncoerced. Ondaatje's later work produces this aesthetic...