For my birthday this year, I bought Michael Ondaatje’s A Year of Last Things. This new collection of poems and prose feels like a glimpse into the author’s private storehouse of personal moments, travels, writing notes, and the lives and works of others, as he looks back over eighty-odd years of life and celebrated writing. A prose piece entitled “Winchester” explores the effect of a brutal boarding school, Winchester House, in his Sri Lankan childhood when “we were really being taught to fear the future” and how that experience became transfigured into story and character. There are vivid accounts of a first improbable life-altering meeting (in “Two Photographs”) and tender last ones (in “November”, “Stella”, and “Last Things”). An incongruous gallery of “doubt or unawareness in the self-portraits of artists” is given a tour in the poem “His Chair, A Narrow Bed, A Motel Room, The Fox”. In “Estuaries”, literary characters are set loose from their creators in meandering uncertain landscapes where anyone may be lost— landscapes of “half-formed thoughts” and “unmarked graves”. In the closing poem, “Talking in a River”, the poet writes, “You swim into late afternoon. The past more distant, / more alive…”. A deeply reflective and resonant collection.
— S. E. Chapman taught English overseas and was a government policy advisor before turning to full-time writing. Amongst other projects, she is working on a novel. She has been published in LampLight magazine and Bywords.ca.
You can read S. E. Chapman's story "Had Love" in Issue 307 (Spring 2026). Order the issue now!
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