With A Year of Last Things, acclaimed novelist Michael Ondaatje returns to poetry, looking back on a life of displacement and discovery. Born in Sri Lanka during the Second World War, Ondaatje was sent as a child to school in London, and later moved to Canada.

While he has lived there since, these poems reflect the life of a writer, traveller and watcher of the world describing himself as a 'mongrel', someone born out of diverse cultures. Here, rediscovering the influence of every border crossed, he moves back and forth in time, from a childhood in Sri Lanka to his last stage performance, from icons in Bulgarian churches to the Californian coast and loved Canadian rivers, merging memory with the present, looking back on a life of displacement and discovery, love and loss.

As he writes in the opening poem: Reading the lines he loves he slips them into a pocket, wishes to die with his clothes full of torn-free stanzas and the telephone numbers of his children in far cities Poetry where language is made to work hardest and burns with a gem-like flame - is what Ondaatje has returned to in this intimate history.