A.F. Moritz*

A.F. Moritz is one of Canada’s leading poets. He was born in Ohio, and teaches at Victoria College, University of Toronto. He has lived in Toronto since just before his first collection Here (1975) appeared. Since that time he has published 21 further poetry books, including his most recent collection, Great Silent Ballad (2024, Anansi). Three times he has been a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for poetry, and in 2009 he was awarded the Griffin Prize.

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.

John Slater*

John Slater is a Trappist monk at the Abbey of the Genesee in New York State. His most recent book is Beyond Measure: The Poetics of the Image in Bernard of Clairvaux (2020, Cistercian Publications). That book is written under the name of Isaac Slater, which is the name he’s known by at the Abbey. His poetry collections have been published under his birth name ― John Slater.

The following poem was presented through a video reading by Slater, to accompany the first station in the Crossings Toronto Arts Exhibition which was presented by Imago in central Toronto from March 2 to April 14, 2022. The sixteen poems, and sixteen accompanying pieces of visual art appear in the Crossings Catalogue.

Among the sixteen Canadian poets included in Crossings Toronto are, Sarah Klassen, John Terpstra, D.S. Martin, and Sally Ito.

I encourage readers to seek out a copy, and to use this resource for devotional reflections throughout Lent and Easter for many years to come.

Entry to Jerusalem (King of Peace)

Somber Palm
Sunday all
over the
world—streets
and churches
empty.

*

He comes! they
spill out from
the City
hosanna!
scramble up
palm trees hack
off branches
wrestle from
cloaks to fling
at his feet
joyous o-
vation for
the people’s
champion
head down meek
riding a
donkey—led
into the
ring—his face
set like flint.

*

The children
swept up in
their parents’
ecstasy
dart thru crowd
cut palm wave
branches shout
hosanna!
this strange king
like them with
no standing.

*

Before the
crown of thorns
purple robe
torture—be-
comes his own
parody
of Herod
and Pilate
So you are
a king? no
followers
defending
his kingdom
by force he
shall banish
chariot
and horse the
warrior’s
bow king of
suffering
king of peace.

*

Monks process
into an
empty church
palm fronds poke
discreetly
from choir stalls
spray from vase
near altar
the chant less
exultant
than serene
and yet still
carpeting
the Master’s
path with song.

Posted with permission of the poet.

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about John Slater: 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.

John Terpstra*

John Terpstra is a Hamilton poet and writer. His most recent poetry collection is Mischief (2017, Gaspereau Press) — a playful and accessible book that subtly draws us into its depths through its seeming simplicity and its sympathetic voice.

Here we see more of who John Terpstra is — such as through his compassionate reflections on neighbours and strangers alike. Perhaps more than in any other collection, he also reveals his alternate identity as a carpenter and cabinetmaker; two of the poems which do this, previously appeared in my anthology, The Turning Aside: The Kingdom Poets Book of Contemporary Christian Poetry.

Of his five nonfiction books, two are about the landscape of his chosen city. His first, Falling Into Place (which first appeared in 2002) focusses on a huge glacial sandbar known as the Iroquois Bar — and the most-recent, Daylighting Chedoke (2018, Wolsak & Wynn), is about the now-largely-underground Chedoke Creek. Both books consider how human activity has altered the landscape.

Terpstra has also recently contributed three poems to the second Poiema anthology, Adam, Eve, & the Riders of the Apocalypse.

The following poem, before it appeared in Mischief, was published in the chapbook Brendan Luck (2005, Gaspereau Press) and in Reformed Worship — from which it was submitted, and won an Evangelical Press of America Prize for Poetry in 2009.

Needlecraft

In the church where we go to now
the words of the preacher
begin innocently enough
to thread through the fabric of our lives.
They draw together shapes
not previously recognized,
and connect portions of the narrative
as yet unread, or not yet readable,
a pattern not apparent,
as though written and stitched
by a random hand.

The church where we go to now
Is, and is not, the church
of our fathers and mothers.
The old words do not come easily,
here, the songs have faded and frayed,
they have been crushed and ground
by the lives of our forebears,
the weighing down of history.

The preacher is not innocent.
She is both fearful and full of joy.
She would unburden us,
but the slim silver sliver that she guides
will prick
as it moves through,
and there is blood on the pattern,
the page, on the hand,
as well as healing,
just as there was for our mothers and fathers.

She pulls the thread, taut,
then snaps it between her teeth.
Amen. For now and forever
amen to this bite of a new
dispensation, ancient
and exact
as needlecraft.

Posted with permission of the poet.

*This is the third Kingdom Poets post about John Terpstra: first post, second post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. His latest poetry collection is Ampersand (2018, Cascade). His books are available through Amazon, and Wipf & Stock, including the anthologies The Turning Aside, and Adam, Eve, & the Riders of the Apocalypse.

Susan McCaslin

Susan McCaslin is a British Columbia poet, who taught at Douglas College from 1984 to 2007. She is the author of eleven poetry collections, most recently, Demeter Goes Skydiving (University of Alberta Press), and this year's The Disarmed Heart (St. Thomas Poetry Series) which features poems about peace and war.

The following poem first appeared in Christianity & Literature. Susan also included it in Poetry And Spiritual Practice, an anthology she edited, which includes poems by such fine Canadian poets as Richard Greene, John Terpstra, Margo Swiss, Hannah Main-van der Kamp and George Whipple.

A Midrash on the Kingdom Prayer

better known as the Lord's Prayer
or the Our Father. It obviously addresses

someone more affectionate than a storm god,
someone more like the parent who listened.

The Kingdom Prayer is not about a kingdom.
It is about a presence on a lawn.

It is a prayer about the balancing of rhythms,
what we hear and what we don't hear.

Heaven is within, invisible while
the Name is expressed, pressed out.

These are both true, as if to say,
Holy what we see, holy what we don't see.

Then we get to forgiveness or reciprocity.
Everything forgiving everything is the kingdom.

It has no head of state.
Lead us not into temptation and deliver us are one.

There are always the holes to step into.
the scrabble and the helpers.

The delivering is active, like birth.
The kingdom is a child's kite winding in.

All you have to do is imagine it
and here it is. The presence now.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. His new poetry collection, Conspiracy of Light: Poems Inspired by the Legacy of C.S. Lewis, is available from Wipf & Stock as is his earlier award-winning collection, Poiema.

John Terpstra*

John Terpstra — poet, writer and cabinet maker — is the author of nine volumes of poetry, including Disarmament (which was short-listed for the Governor General's Award for poetry in 2004) and Two or Three Guitars, his selected poems. His newest collection, Brilliant Falls, has just appeared from Gaspereau Press — the publisher behind Terpstra's poetry and prose books since 2000.

Don McKay has said, “John Terpstra’s meditations have the soundness and snug fit of consummate carpentry, measure in language and in thought showing ‘the ultimate patience involved / in all things made.’ His writing is religious writing from the ground up, negotiating the difficult moral terrain between wildness and ‘development’ with an imaginative grasp reminiscent of Dennis Lee’s Civil Elegies. His are important books, with the toughness of maple, and the compassion of cedar.”

The following poem is from his new book — Brilliant Falls (2013).

Topographies of Easter

We are walking in the mild mid-winter
snow and thin ice, up Coldwater Creek,
its many tributaries, their steep ravines
tracing the blue and brown lines that wind
dizzily over the unfolded whiteness of our new
map, like staves for the crazy earth song we've been
sight-reading with our feet. We are singing the impossible
pitch of these slopes and cliffs, losing our place
in a landscape that lives to improvise, and the map
helps, but nothing written is in stone,
and it's always a revelation, stopping to
compare what's on paper with being there.

Because I did not for a moment doubt in childhood
the story of this rising, shall I, now
I am wiser? The world still has no
boundary. The lines still shiver and wave;
the impossible takes place; people are kind.
And these woods are still as real and magic
as when I first chased and followed any path
that found me, and just as fearful, and brown death
still haunts the green, discolouring all
in brilliant falls ground to sodden mulch,
from which, in deepest regions of the wood,
the bright stem still rises, witnessed by
those few who run like children home to tell us.

I'll say this: whom she supposed to be
the gardener sings and dances the contour lines
that are his body; this body that is broken
for us to wonder at the source, broken
into beauty that lures our present rambling
and leads us to the edge of this escarpment,
where the waters fall, where all our many streams
cascade and plunge, in curtain and ribbon, over
terrace and washboard
--------------------------(our terms for the living text:
earth's open veins)
----------------------and where we meet her,
who has run and sung and danced these trails
since the day she first saw
the massive rock dislodged
from the cliff-face
----------------------of any reasonable expectation.
And all these years removed from childhood
we still leap aboard, to feel if it shifts
of moves us, trusting and not trusting,
not willing and willing
--------------------------the rock to roll on.

Posted with permission of the poet.

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about John Terpstra: first post, third post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the award-winning author of the poetry collections Poiema (Wipf & Stock) and So The Moon Would Not Be Swallowed (Rubicon Press). They are both available at: www.dsmartin.ca

John Terpstra

John Terpstra is the son of Dutch immigrants to Canada — a poet and cabinet-maker living in Hamilton, Ontario. His poems often consist of reflective narratives, which usually stretch to two or three pages, and express his fascination with landscape, community, Scripture and story. His seventh volume of poetry, Disarmament (Gaspereau Press, 2003) was short-listed for the Governor General’s Award. In this collection there are six poems which begin, “In the church where we go to now...” although the idea of church isn’t always literal, nor is it concerned with making Christians look good.

Three of John Terpstra’s most-recent books are prose; this is a logical transition, considering his narrative style. Hopefully his nonfiction will not squeeze out his poetry writing. His most-recent book of poetry is his selected poems: Two or Three Guitars.

Poolside

------Now in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate is a pool...
------------------------------------------------------— John 5

There is no water flatter, or more still,
than the water that is contained within the blue walls
of the randomly shaped swimming pool
at the resort hotel on a shore of the Caribbean Sea.

Lounging beside it, I recall the pool
around which the infirm would gather, waiting
for the one day of the year an angel came
to trouble its surface, and the first to enter was healed.

I have waited the better part of a long winter
to be here. Beyond the palms of this hotel
is the village of small concrete homes, flat roofs
and brightly-coloured doors that opened

to the tour bus negotiating its exceptionally
narrow streets, hauling us all from the airport.
The bus bleats, Let me through, Let me through.
You wouldn’t have thought we could make it.

Poolside, rich imported languages blossom
like tropicals. French, Italian, German, Dutch.
and the one I dip my tongue into,
are interspersed with the occasional bleat

of goat. The goats are tied to palm trees,
under which the tour buses idle. Porters
push carts of baggage between lounge chairs
while the angels who daily trouble our sheets

and towels to perfection, talk, and walk in twos
a straight line through to the rust buckets waiting
to return them home to the village, after shift.
The poor are with us always, and we have come

a long way to find them. The first one into the pool
is already better for it, in this heat.
The water returns to a stillness I have come
already to love. Were he to stretch a hand

and offer it, I think I could not stand
to relinquish this choice infirmity.

(Posted with permission of the poet)

Read my Image Update review of John Terpstra's poetry collection,Two or Three Guitars here

This is the first Kingdom Poets post about John Terpstra: second post, third post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the award-winning author of the poetry collections Poiema (Wipf & Stock) and So The Moon Would Not Be Swallowed (Rubicon Press). They are both available at: www.dsmartin.ca