The central formal and thematic concern in Michael Ondaatje's work has been the description of internal and external reality as dynamic, chaotic and ambiguous. Michael Ondaatje's collections, The Dainty Monsters and Rat Jelly, and his longer poems, the man with seven toes and The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, serve to redefine the reader's sense of reality and create an awareness of this ambiguity and absurdity. In order to confront a reality that at first seems resistant to verbal representation, Ondaatje is compelled towards a dialectic of language and silence that provokes him into an even more ambitious poetry that re-enacts the confrontations between life and art.
