Billy the Kid, a failure

The Collected Works of Billy the Kid is a strange collection from Ondaatje, an author best known for his dense novels. I feel that much of the book was concerned with the power of the image in creating a historical narrative. By including the photographs (what most of us would consider the truest form of an image) side by side with prose and poetry, he has made the insufficiency of the image apparent. We get much more background of the character of Billy the Kid or William Bonney from the sprawling prosaic sections, and perhaps to a lesser extent the poetic ones. Certainly the least historical content, or more generally the least information, comes from the photographs.
The most vivid description comes from the prosaic sections and I take this as a clear sign that Ondaatje believes in the power of prose. He often relegates the poetic sections to fanciful childishness or jagged/incomplete description. There seems to be a hierarchy of usefulness established by Ondaatje in this work: prose is most informative, poetry is less informative and the image alone is the least informative. (This comes as no surprise, Ondaatje goes on from writing this book to become a famous novelist.) I got the sense of the violence of the Old West from the prosaic sections to be sure, but the poetic sections failed to fail properly. If Ondaatje is trying to argue for the insufficiency of the image (i.e., poetry), he has it wrong. If one equates poem with image, then yes Ondaatje's use of poetics is a sufficient failure, however I for one do not equate the image directly with the poem. Although I agree that the image (alone) is not in service to us in this age of mechanical reproduction, Ondaatje's attempt to demonstrate this by simply making the poetics half-assed(for lack of a better word) falls a little short.
The most successful aspect of this collection for me is Ondaatje's use of anachronism to demonstrate the tendency we often have to impose modern ideologies on past events. The most glaring situation being when he talks at length about a modern movie theater (p. 24). I would have enjoyed seeing this understated aspect to be explored further.
The other part that I enjoyed was the selection from Billy the Kid (1971, Charlton Press):
The juxtaposition of the violent and sexual tale that Ondaatje weaves with the cleaned-up for kids version that the comics presents is indicative of how mythology gets prepared for consumption by children. Although the violence and sex are still there, they are expressed in (what would be deemed in our society) child-appropriate forms.