The Collected Works of Billy the Kid

I enjoy the poetry, newspaper, journal like feel of the writing. It was one of my favorite reads for class.

"The Collected Works of Billy the Kid" creates a beautiful and visceral written collage about the legendary Billy the Kid. Written in a mixture of prose, poetry, clippings and interviews, the reader may not always be sure of whose voice they are hearing and whether the pictures being painted in their head are based on reality or fiction; or both. You can feel in your very skull the heat of the mid-day sun... This is the wonder that is Ondaatje's postmodern take on the Western. It is a book to be experienced; read and re-read. Each time you return you will find something new to consider and move with. The language Ondaatje uses is among the most compelling that I have ever read. Best consumed with the suspended need for the linear and clear.

There was a time, pre-English Patient, when the innovative work of Michael Ondaatje appeared assured of standing the test of time, as this slender, groundbreaking volume of poetry, prose, and prose-poetry, now some 35 years old, makes clear. It is, arguably, if not the best--that would be Coming Through Slaughter--then certainly the most felicitous work in Ondaatje's ouevre, and one would be hard pressed indeed to describe it as anything less than a work of sparkling genius. That the author's more recent, utterly conventional efforts--first Patient, then Anil's Ghost--have, by comparison, evidenced such a precipitous decline, is only sad. But, if you want to read Ondaatje at the near-height of his powers, you could do far worse than Billy the Kid. (Or Slaughter. Or Running in the Family.) Those were the days. And they were better days. And ballsier days. And brassier. Far better days indeed than Mr. Ondaatje's nowadays. It is the author's express lack of nerve, the lack of nerve expressed in his recent work, that one now deplores. But when Ondaatje was great, he wrote Billy the Kid, the great work of a once-great writer. And in those days, few, few indeed, were greater.

Michael Ondaatje's sprawling sequence of verse interspersed with poetic prose exposes the persona poem as one of poetry's surest paths to honesty. Through unsettlingly precise detail and unsentimental empathy, the character of Billy the Kid is recreated-and revisited-in all its brutality and splendor. Ondaatje's unflinching commitment to honesty yields a persona that is as vibrant and realized as possible, resulting in a series of confessions that range from disturbing to revelatory. The image, consistently startling, graphic and discomforting, carries the speaker through the entire sequence. Whereas most imagery depends on the eye for effect, Ondaatje utilizes all five senses throughout the book. We taste wine "so fine/it was like drinking ether," we feel Pat Garret's "oiled rifle" against Maxwell's cheek and hear it fire beside his ear, "leaving a powder scar on Maxwell's face that stayed with him all his life." We smell the smoke in Garret's shirt and taste the nicotine in his mouth. At times, the stunned silence of Ondaatje's unremitting narrative conjures a hush so palpable that we can "listen to deep buried veins in our palms." It doesn't take long for The Collected Works of Billy the Kid to immerse the reader in its own unique world, accessible now only through words and photographs.Most memorable, though, are the intensely graphic images that sprout from the page throughout the book. The chicken digging for a vein in the dying Gregory's neck, the warts in Billy the Kid's throat "breaking through veins like pieces of long glass tubing," the blood caked in Tom O'Folliard's "hair, arms, shoulders, everywhere." All these paint an unmistakable landscape of a bleak and desolate New Mexico in the 1880's, a scene so haunted that even "the sun turned into a pair of hands" and pulled out hairs from Billy the Kid's head which, we're told later, is "smaller than a rat." Not one potentially enlivening detail is overlooked; not one square inch of landscape or action escapes the reader's view. Ondaatje's ambitious project demonstrates that the recipe for great writing is precise detail compounded by believable emotion, a recipe he follows to the letter. Ondaatje executes these two devices so effectively at times that a kind of piercing, revelatory insight emerges periodically. Magical disclosures such as the characterization of Pat Garrett as one who "became frightened of flowers because they grew so slowly he couldn't tell what they planned to do," help to fully realize both the character of Billy the Kid and the times in which he lived, and establish Ondaatje's book as perhaps one of the greatest attempts at persona poetry in the 20th century.

This collection of prose and poetry traces William Bonney's passage across New Mexico. Some of the short passages (on average, one per page) are Billy's voice, others Pat Garrett, some of Billy's friends, or his girlfriend. This was a delightful discovery, being both a fan of great writing and of westerns (you don't often encounter both in the same place). Ondaatje's writing here reminded me strongly of ee cummings, which is a very high compliment! Recommended!

Ondaatje's first book is a bona fide masterpiece. Pure and simple, Billy the Kid is a wonderful weave of the mythology of the old west, the darkest vines of human nature, and the poetry in all things that makes life worth living. I thought Coming Through Slaughter, which utilizes some of the same kinds of architecture in its scattered-card-like narrative, was brilliant; Billy the Kid adds mind-blowing to that!