Reviewed by Heather Campbell
The Distance of a Shout
by Michael Ondaatje
Alfred A Knopf
Hardcover, February 2026, 240 pages
With a career that spans over 50 years as a highly celebrated and awarded writer, Michael Ondaatje’s latest collection of selected poems, The Distance of a Shout, has no shortage of material to draw from. The selection included here ranges from early 1970’s volumes Rat Jelly and The Collected Works of Billy the Kid up to 2024’s A Year of Last Things. Equally known as a poet and novelist, his novels, including The English Patient, have perhaps brought him more widespread recognition, but poetry was where Ondaatje’s career began.
Ondaatje was born in Sri Lanka in 1943, spent his childhood in England, and moved to Canada, where he still lives, when he was 18. This personal trajectory is deeply reflected in both his prose and poetry. What becomes immediately apparent in this collection is how much of Ondaatje’s work deals with history, often through the lens of memory: the way things are remembered, or the way memory shapes the boundaries of our world and our relationships.
It is hard not to read the collection as a passage of time itself: the many rivers that are referenced are as many veins of personal history, books are infused with how or where they are read, the constant reflection on history becomes a beginning, the start of the creative process itself: “We began with myths and later included actual events” he writes in “A Gentleman Compares His Virtue to a Piece of Jade”, a line that could summarize much of Ondaatje’s collection. Or as put by Billy in The Collected Works of Billy the Kid:
Not a story about me through their eyes then. Find the
beginning, the slight silver key to unlock it, to dig it out.
Here then is a maze to begin, be in.
And more recently, from A Year of Last Things’ “Unlit Hut”:
They were busy with memory,
chanting poems while ill, making fun
of the nightingale, listening to
a night rain worrying the flowers(…)
A few syllables from the past
‘Some things I just covet,’ my friend says
when I show this to her
three hundred years later
Spare, heavy, and firmly crafted, Ondaatje’s attention is drawn to the small and everyday, allowing these simple observations to become where poetry lives, as though infusing the real with reality. Poetry is rendered from conversations, from photographs, from the remembered touch between bodies, much as a buried Buddha in “750 AD” is “pulled from earth with ropes/into a surrounding world”, where:
Bronze became bronze
around him,
colour became colour.
This is what Ondaatje provides us: poetry becomes poetry.
Writing about the act of writing also features large in the collection, often seen through the relationship between art and nature, and the act of creating art under the watch of the cycles of creation/ destruction in the natural world. Words and language become characters, and we watch a poised, almost static wrestling match with vocabulary:
All afternoon I stroll the plotless thirteen hundred
pages of a Sanskrit dictionary
with its verbs for holy obsessions,
the name for an alcove
of coin washers whose fingers glint
all night with dark lead, grains of silver
Here root vowels take
an accent at high altitudes
the way dictionaries
speak over mountains (from “Definition”)
What this collection confirms is that Ondaatje is, beyond all, a master storyteller, largely through his ability to capture character with the same precision he chooses words. Each personality presented here, be it a blurred face in a photo or a close friend or lover, draws us in. This ability is perhaps summarized best in “The Gate in His Head”:
And this is all this writing should be then.
The beautiful formed things caught at the wrong moment
so they are shapeless, awkward
moving to the clear.
About the reviewer: Heather Campbell is a Montreal-based poet with publications in Grain, Prairie Fire, CV2, The Capilano Review, and PRISM International. Her reviews have appeared in Grist, the Women’s Post and Dance International Magazine.