A.F. Moritz

A.F. Moritz has authored more than twenty poetry collections, including Rest on the Flight into Egypt (1999, Brick Books), The Sparrow: Selected Poems (2018, Ananasi) and As Far As You Know (2020, Anansi). From March 2019 until May of 2023 he served as Poet Laureate of Toronto. He teaches Creative Writing at the University of Toronto, and in 2009 he received the Griffin Poetry Prize.

When CBC Radio asked him why he writes poetry, and why it is significant, he spoke of his childhood journey with poetry, and continued,
-----"As I got a little older, I realized and prized that I’d been
-----fascinated by poetry from much earlier, from well before I could
-----read. I connected Poe and the other poetry I soon was reading to
-----the poetry I had heard, from nursery rhymes adults read me out of
-----books, to children’s traditional street and play rhymes, to the
-----Catholic liturgy which, of course, contains some of the world’s
-----great poetry. For instance, I can remember clearly that the
-----suffering servant song of Isaiah was both searing and dear to me
-----from before my ability to read, probably from a couple of years
-----before, although times are impossible to recall precisely in that
-----period of life just emerging from the childhood amnesia. Anyway,
-----this poem has always remained as a chief basis of my work, as
-----something that I remember constantly, and probably don’t have to
-----'remember': by now it simply is me. So too with the psalms, passages
-----of Paul, and the like."

The following poem is from his collection The New Measures (2012, Anansi).

The Grand Narrative

The waters of the pool were troubled
each day, but only at the certain hour,
evening, when the angel entered―
when light, newly reaching
the beginning of its fading,
was most powerful, least dazzling, wholly
absorbed in colors. The water
cured every sickness in the first who touched it
and the blind man stretched out close by
and no one ever told him
the turbulence had come and the city
was darkened, the end had passed
but not yet fallen. No one
so much as kicked him so he tipped
into the boiling, into the seeming
the flat dusty pond was about to be
a fountain. Teacher, he shouted once,
when he heard the teacher had come,
there’s no one to carry me to the pool,
and the man answered him: Here
Here is an inexhaustible
troubling. It’s yours now. You can
see and walk. Remember me
next time you’re lame, blind, gnarled,
stuck in anemia or filth. Enter
the memory and see
the world shine
hating you, filling you
with beasts and birds, trees and flowers,
the growing distant
gabble of many friends, and walk
to unjust death in this city, this
happiness of living and moving again.

Posted with permission of the poet.

This post was suggested by my friend Burl Horniachek.

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.

Micheal O'Siadhail*

Micheal O'Siadhail is Poet-in-Residence at Union Theological Seminary. He is an Irish poet whose poetry is characterized by formalist structures. After having already published more than a dozen previous collections, he set for himself ambitious tasks with his recent books.

His Testament (Baylor University Press, 2022) is O'Siadhail collection of 150 psalms, plus 50 more poems that connect with the stories of the gospels ― a book which numbers 230 pages of poetry.

Even more ambitious is The Five Quintets (Baylor, 2018) ― which is described by Jeremy Begbie as, “…the culmination of an extraordinary life’s work…vast in scope. O’Siadhail attempts nothing less than an exploration of the predicaments of Western modernity as they appear in five fields of human endeavor: science, arts, economics, politics, and philosophy and theology.” This 350-page poem dialogues with such poets as Dante, Donne, Milton, Baudelaire, and T.S. Eliot, but also with dozens of significant historical figures such as Bach, Chagall, Karl Marx, and Margaret Thatcher.

I want to highlight this significant poet at this time, as Micheal O'Siadhail will be the guest of Imago for a reading at Timothy Eaton Memorial Church in Toronto on September 20th, 2023 accompanied by jazz pianist Mike Jansen: (learn more!)

The following submerged sonnet is from the larger work.

From The Five Quintets

John Milton, I admire your self-belief
That you’re another Dante London-born
To set the ways of God in high relief―
I know the cost of what delights you scorn.
Although fame-spurred you live laborious days
With Providence still in the common grain;
To want to prove God’s ways itself betrays
Enlightenment that thinks it must explain.
Rebirth all earned, for you no grace comes free,
Afraid you’ll hide your talent in the earth
While your taskmaster watches from above;
Your judging carpenter from Galilee
Keeps measuring in virtue and self-worth.
How could we justify a God of love?

Posted with permission of the poet.

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about Micheal O'Siadhail: 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.

Edward Shillito

Edward Shillito (1872―1948) is an English poet and writer who was born in Hull, and was educated in Manchester and Oxford late in the 19th century. He served as a Congregational minister in many places across England, including in London coming up to and during the First World War. He served as a chaplain in the trenches, but was dismissed from service due to injuries he received on the battlefield.

Some of his poetry collections include: The Omega and other poems (Blackwell, 1916) Jesus of the Scars and other poems (1919, Hodder and Stoughton), and Poetry and Prayer (SCM, 1931).

I discovered this poem in an anthology called A Treasury of Christian Verse (SCM Press) which a friend of mine Anne Laidlaw found in a UK bookshop.

The following poem might be better understood by considering what Shillito must have witnessed during WWI, and the pain that that war and its aftermath caused.

Jesus of the Scars

If we have never sought, we seek Thee now;
Thine eyes burn through the dark, our only stars;
We must have sight of thorn-pricks on Thy brow,
We must have Thee, O Jesus of the Scars.
The heavens frighten us; they are too calm;
In all the universe we have no place.
Our wounds are hurting us; where is the balm?
Lord Jesus, by Thy Scars, we claim Thy grace.
If, when the doors are shut, Thou drawest near,
Only reveal those hands, that side of Thine;
We know today what wounds are, have no fear,
Show us Thy Scars, we know the countersign.
The other gods were strong; but Thou wast weak;
They rode, but Thou didst stumble to a throne;
But to our wounds only God’s wounds can speak,
And not a god has wounds, but Thou alone.

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.

Jean Janzen*

Jean Janzen is a Canadian-born Mennonite poet, who has lived her adult life in the United States, primarily in Fresno, California. She is the author of such poetry collections as The Upside-Down Tree (Windflower Communications, 1992) and Tasting the Dust (Good Books, 2000).

She has taught at Fresno Pacific and at Eastern Mennonite University, and has served as a minister of worship at the College Community Mennonite Brethren Church in Clovis, California. She has written hymn texts, which have been set to music and are included in several hymn books, including “Mothering God, You Gave Me Birth.”

The following poem is from her collection What the Body Knows (DreamSeeker Books/Cascadia Publishing House, 2015).

What the Body Knows

Maybe it’s the ocean’s rhythmic tug
that helps me sleep, my body’s own
surge remembering its deepest pulse.

Think of those Celtic monks who
scaled the slippery rocks carrying
vellum and inks while the sea broke

and battered beneath them. High
in a crevice, a hidden stone hut
with cot and candle. The scribe

dips and swirls his quill to preserve
the story—Luke’s genealogy,
name after name, letters shaped

like birds in every color, a flight
of messengers released into history.
Each word unfurls the promise,

like Gabriel kneeling. The body
knows that wings, like waves,
can break through walls and enter,

that the secret of the story
is love, that even as we sleep,
its tides carry us in a wild safety.

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about Jean Janzen: 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.