*****

A. F. Moritz served as the sixth Poet Laureate of Toronto fromMarch 2019 to May 2023. He also served for more than a decade as the Goldring Professor of the Arts and Society at Victoria University at the University of Toronto, where he continues to supervise projects in Creative Writing. Moritz has received the Guggenheim Fellowship, inclusion in the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets, the Award in Literature of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and the Ingram Merrill Fellowship. He is a three-time nominee for the Governor General’s Award for English-language poetry (Rest on the Flight into Egypt, The Sentinel, and The New Measures). He was the winner of the ReLit Award for poetry in 2005 for Night Street Repairs. And his collection, The Sentinel, a Globe and Mail Top 100 of the Year, won the 2009 Griffin Poetry Prize.

*****

Review •  Poems

*****

Great Silent Ballad: Poems by A.F. Moritz. £14.99. House of Anansi Press. ISBN:13 9781487012960. Reviewed by Colin Carberry

Since relocating from the U.S to Toronto in 1974, Albert Moritz has produced twenty-two volumes of poetry, for which he has earned numerous awards and honours. His latest book explores some of his now familiar themes, among them childhood; adolescence and maturity; social injustice; and the nature of great poetry. Moritz is a great conversational poet, and the apex of conversation is poetry, which for him is ‘the superior form of consciousness. Science, interpretation, are best thought of as a sort of translation of poetry, and (at one further remove) of experience, into intellectual-rational terms so that some of the content can be had by scientific humanity, which has lost the ability to read the original language.’ (from the Notes).

But one way in which Great Silent Ballad differs from Moritz’s previous books is its more forthright, pugnacious tone. A number of the poems derive from the poet’s urge to say certain things more distinctly; one detects a note of frustration rooted in the perception that what he’s saying isn’t quite understood. Since an early poem, ‘Protracted Episode’ (from 1993’s The Ruined Cottage), Moritz’s project has been ‘to create a speech / that ignores everything this time thinks true: / helpless patterns and correspondences, / the machine of age and endlessness of death.’ In ‘Dead Skunk in the Road’, for instance, he makes it clear that he knows that life does not end at death, and those who believe that it does are forced to bear the burden of their erroneous belief: ‘For one who thinks / that the carelessly murdered skunk, / sleek lovely friend and pest of our backyard / that summer, is dead, there’s nothing.’ In this sense, Moritz is the antithesis of a miserablist such as Philip Larkin, whose great poem ‘Aubade’ expressed his horror of death, because for him it represented the absolute end.

While the majority of the poems in Great Silent Ballad are accessible, Moritz is a highly erudite poet and is in near constant dialogue with the greats, so the Notes at the back of the book are instructive. Montale and Wallace Stevens, for instance, are frequent influences on him throughout his oeuvre, and they are here, too, and being re-envisioned. Several of the poems mention, and a couple of them directly speak with, Juan Ramon Jiménez. There’s also a poem addressed to Andre Breton (‘Letter to Breton’), one about Yves Bonnefoy, and the longest poem in the book, ‘Why Do We Read?’, invokes Shelley. Neruda and Tagore are there as well, as are Leon Felipe’s ‘Como tu…’ and Octavio Paz’s ‘Huastec Woman’. Above all, Moritz is haunted by the shades of Paz, Bonnefoy and Milosz, whom he considers to be the greatest poets of the age. He is also in frequent dialogue with his own previous work.

In the middle of the book, we find ‘Quibble with Hegel’, a very short poem – the memory of floating an acorn cap across a puddle reminds the poet of St. Brendan the Navigator, said to have reached North America in a coracle. The children gathered around the puddle, watching the little boat and observing the invisible saint, are the Celtic gods. But by a squint of the imagination (to quote Ciaron Carson) this boat is also the boat at the end of Le bateau ivre. Also, the oak-and-acorn are an allusion to a famous passage of Hegel’s (see a rather long note at the back of the book). The children are, at once, children, adults, gods and saint: ‘a little coracle bound for mystic Ireland / across a sidewalk puddle. This craft / is getting nowhere. In it, the studious gaze / of the children kneeling by the water / is the holy monk.’

A burning need to confront social evils also preoccupies the poet’s mind and finds expression in his verse. In ‘The Tawer’, for instance, he makes it clear that all who profit from exploitation and injustice have an absolute responsibility to provide some restitution to those who died in slavery or penury. It is not enough to blithely declare, Well, it was a long time ago, what can be done now? Perhaps the vast majority of humanity does not believe that seeking restitution for past injustices is a necessary obligation but in his bones Moritz knows he is right:

…in the light of this death of mine I know
that all is well and still
you owe me my life. You owe me my life on earth,
which was to be happiness in clean mornings
by the sparkling clear ripples under the trees
of my treeless congealed stream. If now you ever
do anything for any instant but weep blood
from your eyes in the strain of trying to discover
how you can give me back the gentle dawns
you owe me—I who’ve been dead two hundred years—
you’re a fool and a murderer.

And to those who ‘scorn or ignore my beloved vocation’ — those who believe poetry has no inherent value, no function beyond a kind of mawkish sentimentality reserved for specific occasions, he has this to say, in ‘To Those Who like To Say “I’m Not Much for poetry”’:

You don’t live if there’s no poetry: you don’t live
at all, or if you appear to yourself to be living, you’re not.
You really are living, though, even if you’re dead,
because you do have poetry, poetry’s with you
whether or not you know it…

Among my personal favourites are ‘The Living Fleet Eternity of Thought’ a flawlessly executed sonnet written in rhyming couplets, and ‘A Blue Bicycle’. Moritz is a master of free verse, but he is also adept when he works in more traditional forms. ‘Where’ is also, for me, one of the big hits in the book. A fully achieved poem, unlike anything I have read before, and one only Moritz could have written.  To this list I must also add ‘The Dusk’ and ‘All I Can Say’ – a hauntingly beautiful and shocking poem.

From the first line of the book, ‘there is no death’, to the last line of the concluding poem, ‘Elsewhere’ – ‘Everything will be fine’ (which riffs off lines from ‘The Tawer’: ‘…in the light of this death of mine I know / that all is well…’) – Great Silent Ballad offers us a refreshing and uplifting vision in the face of violence, social injustice, and inevitable physical extinction, and some of the poems in it are among the finest Moritz has written in his long and distinguished career.

Colin Carberry was born in Toronto but raised in the Irish Midlands. His work has appeared in numerous journals, newspapers and anthologies worldwide (Poetry Ireland Review, Exile: The Literary Quarterly, The Irish Times, Reforma, Jailbreaks: 99 Canadian Sonnets, El Norte, and Život) and in three poetry collections, and his poems have been translated into many languages. His Selected Poems, Ghost Homeland (Scotus Press, Dublin), was translated into Bangla and published in Kolkata, India, in June 2024.

*****

A.F. Moritz: Six Poems from Great Silent Ballad

WHERE

These visions. Some might say I saw them
because I read poetry and became
disposed to astonishment. Some might say
because I was disposed to astonishment
I read poetry. The two parties might debate
cause and effect, chicken and egg. In fact,
no one will say anything. This poem will rest
undisturbed, one of the few things in the world
left respectfully not-dug-up. Like woods
in central Maine, virgin because too remote
to be exploited. Like a stream in Ohio
where industry collapsed, so the water went
fresh again. Like a boy whose parents don’t care
where he gets to. The useless is there and continues.
On economically unviable steeps of rock,
under far evergreens, the mountain potentilla
that once I saw still grows. In my looking at it
many years ago…that’s where I am buried.

[published in Freefall magazine; thank you to editor Micheline Maylor]

THE GIFT

I’ve long given up the dream
of having something to do
with the coming of the good kingdom.
Just let it be coming and let me live
over to one side
and then when it arrives let me live
in one of its rooms off one of its alleys.
It will be plenty simply finally
not to fear my own filth, the puzzle
of the whereabouts of food, the rain
of muddy plaster spheres always falling
a little late, mirroring beneath my ceiling
the pure rain after it starts hitting
the porous tar above. It will be plenty
not to meet, whenever I go out, the random
knives into my eye on the sidewalks,
the random onset of blindness, the lying
waiting to be scraped up. Plenty
not to feel the noise of the sirens
screeching nearer as relief. It will be plenty
and undeserved just to be alone
and the least known beneficiary.

[published in Devour magazine; thank you to editor Bruce Kauffman and publisher Richard Grove]

DEAD SKUNK IN THE ROAD

They were gathered around a smashed skunk
on the street in front of my porch. I counted
about seven billion, not precisely,
but close enough. After all, what do they think
they matter in detail? They were all deciding
that the skunk was what they are.
It would fester there on the asphalt
and some tread prints of its blood
in the middle of their circle. The one thing
visible to everybody. It would stink awhile
before achieving mummification by the sun.
They’d leave it there. Apparently they still thought
they required an icon of meaning.
But later someone would scrape it up.

It was clear, looking at them from the porch,
what was the nature of the object,
the outside world.

For one who thinks of great destiny,
destined but endlessly opening, there is
great destiny. For one who thinks
that the carelessly murdered skunk,
sleek lovely friend and pest of our backyard
that summer, is dead, there’s nothing.
Not the skunk, street, lawnmower, adventure
vacation to Nepal with empty splendour far below
the mountain passes, the deoxyribose,
the Riemann tensor. Not the idea.
For anyone who waits, thinking of our friend
of that summer, the skunk,
there is marvelous destiny.
As long as there are two who think this way
in the city, the rest are safe in nothingness,
for what those two think is not
just what they think.

[published in Verse Afire magazine; thank you to editor Bunny Iskov]

HEARING FROM YOU

O my belovèd monster, I can’t say
that when I first saw you I was stricken
and filled with fear, or astonishment,
or horror and disgust, or awe
at immensity, beauty—awe that these things were real
and did exist somewhere and were greater
than I was ever told,
had ever dreamed. I was only shocked
so much that I was nothing but the shock. I was a splinter
flying in the explosion of your coming.
A streak of that fire. Flying
from you, a part of you. Then I lay
on the ground later
and recalled, after a long or short not knowing
anything, that I am you. Still in this quiet
motionlessness, where the birds, to my stunned awakening,
are brighter and sweeter, fluttering,
whispering, as soon I too will again
start doing, I am being
thrown here from you.

[published in Ampersand magazine; thank you to editor Paul Vermeersch]

HOUSE

It was a house plummeting through the night.
At last I had a home. A place
to stay, my own, a different place
from the hideous roofless pesterings, the appearances
and disappearings that never let me alone.

It was a house collapsing into itself.
When I’d swept all the floors, caulked the cracks,
dusted the picture frames and rubbed the cheap
glasses brighter than crystal, nothing needed
to be fixed ever again. I could walk from view to view,
and any shifting of a figurine
was only for a slightly other beauty.

It was a house all alone in a woods and meadow
among unpopulated hills ringed in by cliffs
snowy in the summers. Twenty steps to the door
and I could shut away the sirens
across the lawn outside, the rusted knives
and needles in gutters, the shouts and threats
or starving-dog indifference of the beggars.

It was a house mine alone
where I could think that if the one I love
ever came home…I would know at last
how to be with her. In that house all my old failure
was just a happy moment of expecting
her soon return in the great continuance
of our being together.

It was a house where no one but me can come—
if they came to see whether I’m dead or asleep, they’d find
the breeze in the open doors, the white
curtain stirring, and a cleanly un-
disquieting rind.

[published in Vallum magazine; thank you to editor Eleni Zisismatos]

THE PATH

You told me you were on a path—
a path you called it—and frantic to take
all other paths. Frantic to have taken
all others you’d ever noticed. As you went,
you crossed intersections, bypassed side roads
and heads of trails, maybe human, maybe animal,
maybe nothing at all, just vegetable gaps.
How anxious you were not to be accused
of having not seen everything that is
essential. You trembled with torturing
eagerness at the maw of every turn-off.
But if you ever took one, you said it was
the same. It was the path you were on
and it went along bypassing many others,
filling your memory with roads
to who knows what—nightmares, lands
of dream. Every way you went,
it was the path, and around it: the clustering
of shadows, something like dense woods
beginning to stir in a night wind,
memories of alley-mouths, openings
half-barred by branches and leaves…

[published in Devour magazine; thank you to editor Bruce Kauffman and publisher Richard Grove]

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