The Collected Works of Billy the Kid [Paperback]

Michael Ondaatje (Author)

Book Description

Release date: March 19, 1996

Drawing on contemporary accounts, period photographs, dime novels, and his own prodigious fund of empathy and imagination, Michael Ondaatje's visionary novel traces the legendary outlaw's passage across the blasted landscape of 1880 New Mexico and the collective unconscious of his country. The Collected Works of Billy the Kid is a virtuoso synthesis of storytelling, history, and myth by a writer who brings us back to our familiar legends with a renewed sense of wonder.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Moving and tragic. . . . Ondaatje is a poet and even his prose moves with rhythmic circular precision.” —The New York Times Book Review“The Collected Works of Billy the Kid strains one’s powers of description.... Ondaatje’s eye for detail is wonderful and he uses it poetically, with superb restraint.”—Larry McMurtry, The Washington Post Book World“Wonderful.... Ondaatje’s language is clean and energetic, with the pop of bullets. This is literature, art.” —Annie Dillard

From the Inside Flap

From the Booker Prize-winning author of The English Patient comes a visionary novel, a virtuoso synthesis of storytelling, history, and myth, about William Bonney, a.k.a. "Billy the Kid, " a bloodthirsty ogre and outlaw saint. "Ondaatje's language is clean and energetic, with the pop of bullets."--Annie Dillard.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 128 pages
• Publisher: Vintage; First Edition edition (March 19, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 067976786X
• ISBN-13: 978-0679767862
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.4 x 8.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #146,733 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 21 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Billy the Kid Speaks! April 24, 2003

By Gianmarco Manzione

Format:Paperback

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. Read more ›

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Ondaatje does an excellent job of western revisionism. April 29, 1998

By A Customer

Format:Paperback

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. Read more ›

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars A real tour de force--stunning in its effect. July 11, 2000

By Mary Whipple HALL OF FAMETOP 100 REVIEWER

Format:Paperback

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.

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Strange and wonderful June 14, 2000

By Meg Brunner

Format:Paperback

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!

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars i liked it April 16, 2000

By "moterbreth"

Format:Paperback

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.