Customer Reviews

Collected Works of Billy the Kid

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Michael Ondaatje begins The Collected Works of Billy the Kid with a caption to a blank space; the picture of Billy the Kid described in the caption is not included. This notion of rewriting the Old West, one character at a time, is an important theme in the book. Billy is cast in a new revisionist light, as a poet, lover, and observer, while still maintaining the traditional exterior of a western gunslinger.
Perhaps the most telling piece of the "reinvented" Billy stems from his relationship with Angie, his prostitute-turned-girlfriend that adds a different dimension to the traditional story. Through their relationship, Billy shows a side of himself missing from the history books-a man once seen as the quintessential cowboy is dependent and vulnerable to Angie, in his words, "caught like a butterfly...in her Tuscon room."

It cannot be said, however, that the Billy the Kid in Ondaatje's work is immune to cold-blooded violence. Billy openly writes of graphic and grotesque images, but they are dealt with in such a delicate and poetic manner that Billy's detachment is forgiven. He sees a separation between business and pleasure, and killing is strictly a profession. At the same time, though, he finds a beauty in violence-even violence against himself or Angie-that reinforces his position as a true poet. Even as he removes bullets from Angie's hand after she has been shot-by bullets meant for him-Billy calls the shots "rolled pellet tongues of pigeons," a subtle metaphor for a grizzly situation. Billy is a true warrior, but he has a clear set of priorities and can put his violent world into prospective. Ondaatje implies that while accepted history may see faceless frontiersmen, nineteenth century individuals were no different from those today, and life, on an emotional level, has changed very little. By providing the normally mundane details of daily life in a poetic context, the book sheds new light on a now complete character that can reason and love in addition to shoot enemies. Billy the Kid is an intense look into such a character, and Ondaatje makes a powerful statement about the true nature of the Old West.

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 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.

This book of poetry is really unlike any other I have ever read (I suppose with my limited experience, that might not be saying much, but bear with me). Rather than dealing with the stereotypical internal issues of the meaning of life and love that characterize many poetic endeavors, Ondaatje takes a character most of us know and then presents him, through various styles of poetry, in the gritty harshness that the subject, Billy the Kid, would require. There are no pulled punches for the sake of beauty, and the poems work all the more effectively because we understand the at-least-partly factual nature of their characters, which are strengthened through periodically injected novel-style passages.

Of course, for the narrative to come off successfully, Ondaatje must be open to take certain liberties with the tale, which he gladly owns up to with the book's opening blank photo of Billy. From that point on, the story is dirty, nasty, cruel, affecting, and powerful. If there's ever been a collection of poems that had the ability to get the "man's man" into the art, this is it.

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!

"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.

If you don't know much about William Bonney, a.k.a. Billy the Kid, or if you think you do know all about him, this book will be a welcome surprise. Ondaatje destroys all the stereotypes of Billy the Kid; he is no longer just a violent outlaw. He is a poet, a lover, and a friend. Through his own words and poems as well as the words of his close friends, the reader gets a fuller and unique description of William Bonney. Ondaatje blends poetry, pictures, and real newspaper accounts into this very unique "novel." And, Ondaatje pulls it off so well that the reader really believes that he is reading something written by William Bonney. The poetry is beautiful and the story is captivating, even if you're not a fan of "wild west" stories. This book is a one of a kind read.

I can think of few things more challenging than trying to write a poem as if it were coming from the mind of Billy the kid. How could anyone ever associate someone so notorious and rough with poetic thought? Michael Ondaatje successfully captures the ruggedness of a western gunslinger while also showing a more romantic and introspective side of Billy the Kid. The wonderful language, historical detail, variety of forms, and colorful stores in this book make it exciting from start to finish. I truely enjoyed Michael Ondaatje's writing and was amazed at the amount of information he was able to pack into 100 pages, especially since over half of them were poetry! I really feel that I learned more about Billy the Kid in these pages than I could have learned in a 300-page novel. Ondaatje's writing takes you inside the mind of Billy Bonney in a way that most prose novels could not.

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!

There are slivers of the truth in Ondaatje's Billy the Kid, all the surrounding players and characters. The settings, the New Mexican snows and sands. The poetry of it all, at least now, in our modern world, looking back and reflecting on what it was, or what it wasn't.

Essentially this is historical fiction as poetry. Even the prose is poetry. He can't help it. It flows naturally and gives a voice, a sorrow, a reality to the antihero Billy the Kid.

I love the many vignettes, the intertwined poetic ruminations by Billy, then the story told a little more clearly, via multiple perspective and experimental forms (photographs, notes, newspaper articles, interviews, other characters' voices, chiasma, etc.). The backstories of Tom O'Folliard and Livingstone the mad-dog man are some of my favorites. Ondaatje paints Pat Garrett as cold and logical, driven, the perfect assassin.

Billy is romantic:

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she is crossing the sun

sits on her legs here

sweeping off the peels

traces the thin bones of me

turns toppling slow back to the pillow

Bonney Bonney (21)

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And he is characterized with a shrewd, watchful eye. Ever observant and capable. Not quite man, but not boy (just Kid, maybe):

--- ---

A river you could get lost in

and the sun a flashy hawk

on the edge of it

a mile away you see the white path

of an animal moving through water

you can turn a hundred yard circle

and the horse bends dribbles his face

you step off and lie in it propping your head

till dusk and cold and the horse shift you

and you look up and moon a frozen bird's eye

(26 -- this is one of my favorites)

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Brilliant book. Fantastic read. It evokes past memories--we explored through Lincoln County and Billy the Kid historical grounds in October 2010. It also evokes memories of the past--many not even mine. Shared west memories of novel indoor baths with warm water, ferrotype photographs, dimestore novels, drafty barns, slow distances over sunburnt land on horseback, the red dirt still, STILL!, and friends who band together. And avenge each other. Highly recommended.