★★★★☆ Civilized savagery

The Cinnamon Peeler: Select Poems

Michael Ondaatje

I have recently read a lot of poetry by classic poets such as Sappho, Li Po, Tu Fu, John Keats, and Robert Browning. To read poets like these, you can get your hands on carefully annotated versions by editors who explain all the obscure references in the poems. Reading Michael Ondaatje's The Cinnamon Peeler: Selected Poems made me realize that I've been underappreciating that luxury. There's a good deal in tCP:SP that remains mysterious to me. For instance the second poem, "Early Morning, Kingston to Ganaoque", ends with these two lines

Somewhere in those fields,
they are shaping new kinds of women

My reaction to that was "Huh? What does that have to do with the previous 15 lines?" I still don't know. They come out of nowhere.

Ondaatje was born in Sri Lanka (although at the time of his birth it may have been known as Ceylon). His first eleven years he grew up in Sri Lanka. His family then moved to England, and eventually in 1962 to Canada, where he became a citizen. His poetry often has a sense of the foreign (and indeed a few of the poems in tCP:SP were written on visits to Sri Lanka). However, his poetry overall has a very Canadian feel to me, myself a Canadian immigrant of more recent vintage. Many of the poems have a very savage feel to me, and no, I don't know what I mean by that and cannot explain it.

I think my favorite poem is "Sweet Like a Crow", addressed to an eight-year-old girl. It begins with this introduction

For Hetti Corea, 8 years old

‘The Sinhalese are beyond a doubt one of the least musical people in the world. It would be quite impossible to have less sense of pitch, line or rhythm’ — Paul Bowles

The poem then proceeds to treat Bowles's observation with all the seriousness it deserves, listing a long series of discordant, disagreeable sounds that Hettie's voice is allegedly like. It reminds me of the way kids joke with each other by throwing exaggerated over-the-top insults at each other. I imagine Hettie laughing out loud as Ondaatje tells her her voice is

Like a crow swimming in milk,
like a nose being hit by a mango

I would have found this very funny at the age of eight, and at the age of sixty-eight I still do.

Unfortunately, "Sweet Like a Crow" is not typical of the poems in tCP:SP. None of the others have quite this sense of fun. They are still good poetry, but in a more civilized and savage way.

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