SOURCE: O'Neill, Michael. “Gazes in the Mirror-World.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 5001 (5 February 1999): 33.

In the following review, O'Neill assesses the technique, language, and themes of Handwriting.

When Hana plays the piano in Michael Ondaatje's novel The English Patient, she is described as “just chording sound, reducing melody to a skeleton”. It is a description that might be applied to Ondaatje's latest volume of poems. By contrast with his fiction, and its lust for a kinetic sensuousness, these poems seem less to flesh out than to suggest. Floating and juxtaposing phrases in the manner of Pound's Cantos or Gary Snyder's Zen-like notations, they often possess the wiry lightness of a sketch. And yet the poems in Handwriting reveal, in their return to Sri Lanka, the poet's birthplace, the sixth-sense awareness of danger which makes vivid the piano-playing episode in The English Patient, where Hana is watched by Kip, the sapper...