SOURCE: “On the Brink”, in Books in Canada, Vol. 13, No. 10, December, 1984, pp. 16-17.

In the following assessment of Secular Love, King-Edwards heralds Ondaatje's break “from reason and control” in the collection, but laments what she perceives as inconsistency in his poetry, arguing “It is jarring… to go from the confessional poems of anguished, passionate love to the more mundane ones of friendship and fatherly love.”

Once again a book by Michael Ondaatje, and the expectancy is qualified by the memory of one's first encounter with The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, a book that swept one through it on an ever-cresting wave. Until Running in the Family and now Secular Love, the passion that Ondaatje has put into his poems and novels has been projected onto characters from the myths of his imagination: Billy of the Wild West and Buddy Bolden of Storyville. This imagination produced powerful...