Dressed in varying shades of gray and sporting a shock of white hair, Booker Prize-winning author Michael Ondaatje immediately grabbed the attention of the audience gathered in the Memorial Chapel last Wednesday night with his quiet opening remark.

“I have to say, it’s such an honor to be an American today” he said, bringing the house down with a few carefully chosen and politically resonant words before he even began to read.

As the night progressed, audience members quickly realized (if they didn’t know already) that this ability to choose exactly the right words and arrange them perfectly is part of what defines Ondaatje as both a poet and prose writer. Appearing on campus as part of the Wesleyan Writing Program’s Distinguished Writers Series, he read excerpts from both his prose and poetry, which include “The English Patient,” “Running in the Family,” “The Collected Works of Billy the Kid,” “The Cinnamon Peeler,” and, most recently, “Divisadero.” He opened with one of his early poems, “The Cinnamon Peeler”, a sensual, slow whisper of a poem that encompasses two of the more prominent themes in Ondaatje’s work: the beauty and brutality of love, and the incredible that can be found in the very ordinary.

The author’s soft, throaty accent seemed to underscore the melancholy of his poetry as he continued with two more poems—“Wells” and “Step”— from “Handwriting,” a later collection. Some audience members leaned forward in their seats or closed their eyes to listen more closely as Ondaatje’s words filled the chapel.

Wistful meditations on life and love soon mixed with laughs, courtesy of passages from Ondaatje’s candid and often hilarious memoir on his childhood, “Running in the Family.” The author’s descriptions of his grandmother, in particular, were affectionate and hilarious.

Most people are most familiar with Ondaatje’s Booker Prize-winning novel, “The English Patient,” and the author did read a vividly descriptive passage from that work. He focused mainly, however, on his newest book, “Divisadero.” Like most of his prose works, it follows several intertwined stories. Ondaatje acknowledged the complexity of its structure as he explained the novel’s basic plotline.

“This is probably the clearest I’ve been about the book, even to myself,” he joked.

The novel’s poetic prose made the plot secondary to Ondaatje’s language. At one point, he describes a photograph of a character in the story.

“It is as if her energy and sensuality had been drawn from the world around her,” he read.

After the reading, Ondaatje engaged audience members in a question-and-answer session, encouraging audience members to speak up.

“I’m pretty evasive, so you can say anything, ask anything,” he laughed.

Listening carefully as ushers passed two microphones around, he fielded a wide variety of questions, including one that questioned his tendency to suddenly drop characters from his narratives.

“When people disappear, they disappear, and they don’t always come back, and I wanted that element in the book,” he explained.

Ondaatje also discussed the new level of appreciation he gained for filmmaking during the making of the Oscar-winning film adaptation of “The English Patient.”

“The most interesting thing was to learn the craft, especially of editing,” he said.

Many of the questions echoed those asked in an earlier class Ondaatje held at Downey House, where fiction, nonfiction and creative writing students had the opportunity to talk to the author about his process, influences and feelings toward his craft., According to Director of Writing Programs Anne Greene, the ability to offer these kinds of opportunities to students is what makes her so thankful to the donors who fund the Distinguished Writers Series.

“It’s really remarkable to hear someone read his or her own work, especially when it’s as beautiful and as lyrical as Michael Ondaatje’s,” Greene said.

Ondaatje, meanwhile, could have been summing up the seeming effortless of his own writing in one passage he read from “Divisadero:”

“Any skill of the divining or dreaming is invisible.”