In October, I attended a reading Al Moritz shared at King W. Books in Hamilton (along with John Terpsta and Brian Bartlett) where he read exclusively from this new book. Moritz opened with “Dead Skunk in the Road”, a poem reviewer Colin Carberry says, “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.”
In an interview, from the time when Sparrow: Selected Poems appeared, Moritz spoke of his interactions with various poets, particularly Gerard Manley Hopkins and John Ashbury, in fine-tuning his world view and his expression of it. He said:
----“In dark times, poetry has to be under the sign of hope. And with
----hope, thinking is really from the end, not the beginning. It's
----realizing that the always possible beginning is the permanent,
----if hidden, presence of the good end in every moment. 'Origin'
----really means not so much any past but the fact that, in a time
----of evil and hope, the structure of existence is this: a beginning
----toward the good that is always possible and always needing to be
----made possible again.”
He underlined these thoughts with lines from Hopkins’s poem “God’s Grandeur” — which he says he always keeps before him — a poem of hope that acknowledges “man’s smudge” but declares “nature is never spent”.
The following poem is from Great Silent Ballad.
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.
Posted with permission of the poet.
*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about A.F. Moritz: first post.
Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Cascade) ― a book of poems written from the point-of-view of angels. His books are available through Wipf & Stock.
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