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The Heart Is an Organ of Fire
| Article
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10403 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1993 |
3,714 Words |
| Author
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Stephen Scobie
Stephen Scobie is a poet and critic; he teaches Canadian
literature at the University of Victoria. His most recent
work, "And Forget My Name," is a speculative biography in
verse of the young Bob Dylan. |
A man falls, burning, from the sky. This is the image-- arresting, violent, beautiful--that begins Michael Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning novel The English Patient. For Ondaatje himself, quite literally, it was this image that began the novel. He has explained in an interview, "I usually begin books in a dreamlike--no, that sounds a little esoteric. But I had this little fragment of a guy who had crashed in the desert. I didn't know who he was, or anything."
It is typical of Ondaatje that the book would begin with an image (rather than a character or a plot), for he is a poet, and all his novels may be described as poetic novels. His early books in Canada--such volumes as Dainty Monsters (1967) and Rat Jelly (1973)--are collections of lyric poems: precise, elegant, beautiful, yet filled with a wild sense of black humor, a love for the bizarre and the exotic, and images of sudden, startling moments of violence.
A girl whom I've not spoken to
or shared coffee with for
several years
writes of an old scar.
On her wrist it sleeps, smooth
and white,
the size of leech.
I gave it to her
brandishing a new Italian
penknife.
Look, I said turning,
and blood spat onto her shirt.
("The Time around Scars," 1967).
The book that is sometimes described as his first novel, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970), is in fact a mixture of genres: prose narrative, lyric poems, collaged texts and illustrations. But it is perhaps best summed up by its seldom-quoted subtitle, Left-handed Poems. This is poetry, then, that comes to you
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