SOURCE: “Poetry and Maturing Poetics,” in Michael Ondaatje, Twayne Publishers, 1993, pp. 67-98.

In the following essay, Barbour traces Ondaatje's poetic development from his first collection through There's a Trick with a Knife I'm Learning to Do. Barbour discovers a trend in Ondaatje's writing toward more experimental and personal poetry.

An edition of selected poems, especially when published by major presses in a poet's own country, the United States, and the United Kingdom, signifies both achievement and recognition. For Ondaatje, the Governor General's Award-winning There's a Trick with a Knife I'm Learning to Do (1979) also provided an opportunity, again especially for the larger international audience that knew him most for The Collected Works of Billy the Kid and Coming Through Slaughter, to pare away some of the perceived chaff in his oeuvre and thus present a particular overview of the maturing of a poet. The poems dropped from The...