The Wren

A.F. Moritz

• Publisher: House of Anansi Press
• Year: 2026
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781487014056
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

A.F. Moritz's twenty-third book of poems originated with an impulse, beginning in April 2019, to write a series of continuous poems. The first goal was to keep them short. The second was to make them separate, in the process reflecting the whole of human life, stable in moments and bodies. In The Wren, Moritz arranges 70 short poems in a sort of galaxy: an apparent scatter, not of stars but of poems, of feeling-thoughts. What is the unity of these active "states" of ours, given that they do not simply follow, or hook onto, or neighbour, or echo one another in a chain of resemblance that seems to have gaps and missing links that reappear later, healed? The title was chosen partly to speak to Moritz's The Sparrow: Selected Poems (2018), but also because, among the many short poems of this collection, one of them asked to be central: a poem about a small bird that hops from within a thicket of stems to peer out at the poet for a second and then disappears back inside. This tiny story of a tiny fellow creature is the narrative, the "novel," of this book: a little story that is nonetheless one of the great and ever-retold stories.

Table of contents

• Tieger Tieger
• So Late
• A Sentence
• When I Was a Child
• Henri Bergson
• What I Am Doing
• An Artist
• Crumbs
• Childhood
• A Rational Explanation
• Clematis
• Noticings
• Only Words
• Reading
• Technology and Me
• Biography of the Tyrant
• Come Live with Me
• The Guitar
• Voice: Ruin
• The Following Day
• A Prosperous Burgher
• Clearly Thinks
• Some Names
• A Lexicon
• Without Wanting
• Here and There
• Moment of Peace
• Apollo
• Talking with Stones
• A Trek
• The Whole World
• Indifference
• A Seduction
• Dream
• Need I Say It
• Your Total Past
• Phronesis the Cricket
• The Dandelion
• When I Was a Child
• Spring Equinox: To God
• Two Lovers
• Full Moon
• Powerlessness
• Légitime défense
• Attempted Retrospect
• Ex Thespian
• A Dream
• And in Perfect Health
• The Drama
• The Beach
• When I Was a Child
• What You Go and Get Is Never It
• Dear Reader
• The Two Poems That There Are
• Just Hanging
• Structure of Nostalgia
• The Central Moment
• Shamed
• Faithfulness
• Earth: Oath
• Place
• An Angel
• The Wren
• My Advantages
• Discouraging Assurance
• The Sun
• The Classic
• Freedom and Power
• His Possession
• The Clock
• Ending and Beginning
• Rearview Mirror
• Policy
• Prejudice Against the Dead
• The Idea of the Corpse
• Actual Intelligence
• Simenon
• To a Poet
• Passional Abstraction
• The Insomniac
• Fragment
• Hence
• Apple Flowers
• This Morning
• Acknowledgements
• About the Poet