"Following several of his internationally acclaimed, beloved novels, A Year of Last Things is Michael Ondaatje's long-awaited return to poetry. In pieces that are sometimes wittily funny, moving, and always wise, we journey back through time by way of alchemical leaps, unearthing writings by revered masters, moments of shared tenderness, and abandoned landscapes we hold onto to rediscover the influence of every border crossed. Moving from a Sri Lankan boarding school to Moliere's chair during his last stage performance, to Bulgarian churches and their icons, to a California coast, and his beloved Canadian rivers, Michael Ondaatje casts a brilliant eye that merges his past and present, in the way memory and the distant shores of art and lost friends continue to influence all that surrounds him"--

Lock -- Definition -- 5 a.m. -- Wanderer -- Last things -- Dark garden -- Then -- A night of radio station in Koprivshtitsa -- What can be named in the Earth -- A cricket in Oplontis 79 CE -- Leg glance -- Lost -- Bruise -- Great impermanence -- A disappearance -- River -- A bus to Fez -- One hundred views of the Pettah Market -- Stillness -- Unlit hut -- Cabbagetown Pet Clinic -- Mask -- Two photographs -- Nights when I drove -- Ford Maddox Ford & his writer friend -- "Singly, in the midst of their own darkness" -- Geography sixth -- A billiard hall, cress sandwiches, wallpaper, a piano solo -- His chair, a narrow bed, a motel room, the fox -- November -- 1912 -- Stella -- Evening -- Into the past -- Winchester House -- "There are three sound in the wood this morning" -- Estuaries -- Talking in a river