The Sparrow

Selected Poems of A.F. Moritz

A.F. Moritz

• Publisher: House of Anansi Press
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781487009755
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Canadian Poetry
• Index: Literature

Featuring internationally acclaimed poetry from more than twenty books and chapbooks published over forty-five years, The Sparrow is a career-spanning selection that reveals how A. F. Moritz's dynamic, ever-exploratory work is also a vast, singular poem.

A. F. Moritz has been called "one of the best poets of his generation" by John Hollander and "a true poet" by Harold Bloom, who ranks him alongside Anne Carson. He is the recipient of numerous awards and honours throughout North America, including the Award in Literature of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Guggenheim Fellowship, Poetry magazine's Beth Hokin Prize, the Ingram Merrill Fellowship, and the Griffin Poetry Prize.

The Sparrow: Selected Poems of A. F. Moritz surveys forty-five years of Moritz's published poems, from earlier, lesser-known pieces to the widely acclaimed works of the last twenty years. Here are poems of mystery and imagination; of identification with the other; of compassion, judgement, and rage; of love and eroticism; of mature philosophical, sociological, and political analysis; of history and current events; of contemplation of nature; of exaltation and ennui, fullness and emptiness, and the pure succession and splendour of earthly nights and days.

The Sparrow is more than a selected poems; it is also a single vast poem, in which the individual pieces can be read as facets of an ever-moving whole. This is the world of A. F. Moritz — a unique combination of lyrical fire and meditative depth, and an imaginative renewal of style and never-ending discovery of form.

Part II

1986–1994

The Tradition

I think we are the heirs of slaves,

a race of water bearers to the patient herd.

But whose memory reaches so far back?

We can see how quickly the children of our day

forget the names of their parents newly dead.

No documents are found in our houses.

No object we make will last two generations.

No skills are handed down

but how to live each day with the flies, the wind

that veers and whips the dust ever replenished,

and distant shouting, random sirens at night.

In these sheds between compulsive howl and silence,

between young and old, what knowledge falls?

Now and again some few among our proverbs

are shown by science to be not wholly meaningless.

Our habits bear resemblance to religion,

our jokes to story. Scholars discuss our culture,

whether vestigial or primitive;

whether by instinct or tradition we patch

hovels of newspaper, boxes, corroded tin

in barren lots sown with splinters of bricks;

whether there is some reason in our claim

that a calm word from this or that deathbed

has exalted starvation, typhus, and mute lethargy.

Our only leisure, afforded by long moments

straining with constricted bowels, gives rise

to pride in our own penetration,

our contempt of self-denial, our ignorance of pleasure.

More than any future,

we want the past to have been marvellous.

Ancestors: these are our one invention.

Pirates, smugglers, revolutionaries.

Beachcombers piling shells, staring over the sea.

Magi of forgotten disciplines,

the content of their researches beyond us —

although the banal formulas that survive

are full of implication.

And the real fathers?

Those who in fact dropped sperm in broken cisterns,

moaning to create us? There is no way to know them,

unless to presume that they were much like us.

Then, at times, they too

felt themselves cherishers of the fire that hides,

inscribes itself only in ash, and like some toad

endures centuries in a toppled well,

sleeping under the rim stones with their forgotten script.

On clear nights in the lanes of the warehouse district,

they too must have glimpsed the setting moon —

its blurred figures buried in watery light —

and claimed it theirs, as the only beings

still conscious in that place and at that hour.

The Explorer

Here among the forks and plates

they want me to remember and describe.

I remember this much:

there weren’t any words in the white deserts, skies, and tombs,

no words in the north,

only green empty air, black limbs, low grey rock

by planes of steely water, and ice in shadows.

Since I came back, all of the words I know

have been wandering in me among those remembered things.

Never yet has one word found a place,

not even a tree or a profile in a cliff

to stop at, to remind it of why it came.

Despite the winds that blow there,

I can still hear the questions.

To app...

Table of contents

• iiAlso by A. F. Moritz
• Dedication
• xixPart I
• 81Part II
• 207Part III
• 261Part IV
• 321Part V
• 361Author’s Note and Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• About the Publisher