Product Description

In this series of "left handed" poems, the award winning Canadian poet Michael Ondaatje presents the life and crimes of Billy the Kid. The legend and the reality of this outlaw are mixed together into a kaleidoscope of poetry, prose, songs, photographs and eye witness accounts from the period.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #608596 in Books
• Published on: 1989-08-25
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 112 pages

Review
The poems, some of them in prose, in this taut and stunning book, dart by like small desert animals. Billy is in charge here, all the way, speaking with the cool precision of an assassin, his images coming rapid and accurate as bullets, taking the measure of friends and enemies, hawks circling, horses straining, women loved and men murdered. Billy, loving Miss Angela Dickinson, who "leans back waving feet at me/catching me like a butterfly/in the shaved legs in her Tucson room"; Billy, appraising Mr. Pat Garrett, who "became frightened of flowers because they grew so slowly that he couldn't tell what they planned to do." Billy, Mr. William Bonney to you, is in control but Ondaatje alternates his voice with that of others who knew him and the many sudden deaths and the dusty stillness of the Southwest, incorporating a jailhouse interview with the press, a passage from a 19th century children's book celebrating the fair Mexican ladies and their boy bandit king, eyewitness accounts and photographs. The effect is that of a series of sepia daguerrotypes of the Old West circa 1880. The cheap pop immortality of Billy is compressed and reduced into hard gemstone. Previously published to wide acclaim in Canada, this has the impact of a high-voltage wire. (Kirkus Reviews)

Customer Reviews

A tour de force--stunning in its effect.
This early (1970) "novel" by Michael Ondaatje is a collage of poetry, narrative, memoir, photography, journalism, and fiction surrounding Billy the Kid. Ondaatje poeticizes Billy's thoughts, giving us "insight" into the inner man, while, at the same time, creating a kind of suspense about the inevitable outcome.

By constantly shifting the narrative focus and point of view from Billy to some of his cohorts, the women who loved them, and the "lawmen" who sought them, Ondaatje avoids the need for transitions which would normally challenge the biographer of a legend. And by allowing time to be circuitous, rather than linear, Ondaatje is able to give flesh and bone to the impressions he creates by enlisting the reader's help in "organizing" his material. In short, this is an impressionistic word-painting which gives freshness and vibrancy to an old saga of the Wild West. Mary Whipple

Buy this book. Then buy it for everyone you know.
This book deserves more than five stars. Michael Ondaatje's writing always hovers about between poetry and prose. This is perhaps my favourite book in the world, because even that balance is somehow transcended. Here is a new form; here is English made new. It's exquisite, delicate, violent, human, perfect. The people are rich as clotted cream and brittle as knives. You'll get splinters off the wood of their houses and dust in your eyes. This book is impossibly good.

an individual book about Billy
To be honest, i was disappointed. Often it was nonsensical, and wasn't true to the REAL Billy. There was more fiction than fact which was disappointing too. i much preferred the j.Weddle book. There were definitely some interesting parts though, and i will read it again.