The final batch of Issue 4 has arrived! This week, for our special feature, we’re sharing an interview with A.F. Moritz, as well as a review of his recent poetry collection The Wren.

New Poetry

We’re also pleased to share new poetry by Ayesha Chatterjee, George Elliott Clarke, Jeannie Prinsen, Burl Horniachek, Taylor Marshall, Brad Davis, and Dorothy Nielsen!

Special Feature: A.F. Moritz

Thanks for reading Issue 4! We hope you enjoyed it. Let us know what you think in the comments!

Happy reading,

The Traces team.

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Sanctuary
by Dorothy Nielsen
 
I like to keep this bird magnet near – 
the one I didn’t remember to send to my mother
before dementia, the nursing home,
and then a quiet dying interrupted
long years in her own kitchen watching for the cardinal
that this magnet recalls each time I pull my fridge door open.
 
I would think of my fridge magnet when, one spring, I’d open
your Zoom link to a Covid-era funeral. Near
my study window, my own resident cardinal
was pouring out a heart-rending song for your mother
while miles away, watched by twittering birds it seems you’d interrupted
among the trees, you gently laid her in her final home.
 
My screen-gallery showed other mourners whose second home,
like mine, was once your mother’s kitchen – always open,
as my mom’s was, to our friends who so often interrupted
their quiet, ousting them, though still we sensed them near-
by playing their patient role of brooding mother,
which only decades later I realized had been a cardinal
                                                                                                              
rule of theirs. Now you tell me your mom loved it when a cardinal
caroled from the elms behind your home.
Studying my bird magnet today, I picture each mother
listening from her kitchen, window open,
watching for a flash of red as four o’clock draws near,
the hour her private dreams are interrupted.
 
When at last I was a parent, I saw how daydreams could be interrupted 
by another soul. And suddenly my first cardinal
appeared with his seeming frenzy to come so near
that he’d launch himself against the window, as if drawn to this home
I was finally making. To stop him, I’d have to wind the window open
wide on those long days of learning the secrets held by a mother,
 
such as, first: that something about being “mother”
might have settled the self, yet at the same time interrupted
those enclosed visions girls will spin, eyes half-shut, half-open
during dreamy years before they fly like a reckless cardinal
at reflections of themselves in the windows of somebody’s home,
crashing into a future they’d never dreamt was so near.
 
Or, second: once a new life has erupted to pry our hearts open,                    
we will need a resident cardinal for the home,                                                        
hovering near, to sing a sanctuary for the mother.

Dorothy Nielsen’s essays, fiction, and poems appear in many books and journals, including The Literary Review of Canada, Contemporary Literature, Canadian Poetry, Christianity and Literature, The Fiddlehead, and Traces Journal. She writes in a variety of free verse and traditional forms; most recently, her alliterative verse poem about the presentation of Christ in the temple was published by Forgotten Ground Regained. Dorothy serves on the advisory board for Traces Journal.

Missing My Dead Cat
by Brad Davis
 
Thought I spied a wet feral by the hedge.
It calmed me. And suddenly the desire

to make its acquaintance. Draw it in
with crumbs from my danish. But

it was cardboard, a crushed beer box
beside a tossed off plastic cup crawling

with ants. I wish it were so easy to make
treasure from trash. I would transform

all empties, all discards—like, say, those car
graveyards overflowing with parts—

perform the alchemical wonder, actually do
what the myths maintain will happen

in God’s good time. But I have only this
time, these conditions, that box and cup.

Brad Davis is a Canadian-American poet living in northeastern Connecticut. Poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Vallum, Traces, Image, Poetry magazine, The Paris Review, JAMA, Puerto del Sol, Brilliant Corners, Spiritus, and many other journals. Brad’s most recent collection is On the Way to Putnam: New, Selected, & Early Poems (Grayson, 2024).

Lamenti 
by George Elliott Clarke
 
(pace Franco Costabile)

My Dove!  Jesus!
Return, descend again,
like incarnate manna,
to remain with us—
O! Dove—
involuted in incense-swirling wind.

You daub us with myrrh  (befalling),
drench us with tears perfume-besotted,
waft—above us—ivory clouds pregnant with incense….

Dove, it ain’t possible, is it?
That Love can be ingrained in air
just as apple-blossom tinctures
permeate a May breeze
or flames inextinguishable, deathless,
house impregnable within a volcano,
is, realistically, the fact of Faith.

Yeah, Time does climax—and relax into Fancy,
as when I sleepily imagine
I navigate a white sanctuary of sunlight.

Then again, Pain rivets me—
as much as does Beauty
or Love….

Christ!  Lookit!

Thy nails don’t just spike my palms and ankles,
but also my twinned eyes,
turning prophecies irreparably bloody
as if Thy Apostle John
doubles as Jack the Ripper, eh?

No?

I recognize the Renaissance splendour—
Michelangelo-imagined—
of the divine Light
rinsing calligraphic Poetry
(scriptures, scrolls)
in gold-wash,
illuminated, enlightening.

My Dove, Jesus!
Return,
become incarnated,
reborn,
in each of us,
as Love,
thus grafting upon us wings.

[Cetraro (Italia) 25 mai mmxxv]

George Elliott Clarke was born in Windsor, Nova Scotia, in 1960. He was the 4^th Poet Laureate of Toronto (2012-15) and the 7^th Parliamentary/Canadian Poet Laureate (2016-17). An English professor at the University of Toronto, Clarke has taught at Duke, McGill, UBC, and Harvard. He has received the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Fellows Prize, Governor-General’s Award for Poetry, National Magazine Gold Award for Poetry, Premiul Poesis (Romania), Dartmouth Book Award for Fiction, and the Eric Hoffer Book Award for Poetry (US). Basta!

When You Go to Weigh my Heart
by Taylor Marshall
 
will you hear the salty flesh
of crow in my mouth?

Pinot Grigio and tilapia
sitting cold and uneaten on the table:

A peace offering rendered:
undigested. Regretful,

yet, I can taste, so clearly – 
Chalky ashes filling up my cheeks.

My smile and yours,
Buoyed / only by

        these marigold–en glasses

and a kaleidoscope that
the Desert Jackal

holds between his hands.
How many kilograms

of scorched memory 
can one carry?
	
        I think, an endless pool.

Taylor Marshall is an emerging writer from Regina, Saskatchewan on Treaty 4 lands. Her work has appeared in Pinhole Poetry Press, Spring Magazine Vol.14, [S P A C E] Magazine, and Acta Victoriana Literary Journal. Her debut poetry chapbook, “Transits,” was self-published in 2024. Taylor’s writing often ruminates on mercurial possibilities of selfhood along with the accompanying internal and external metamorphoses reflective of grief, change, and rebirth.

my mother talks to the medical staff
by Jeannie Prinsen
 
we found metastatic disease, in other words cancer
	the Ds and the Fs were all coming in waves 
it doesn’t usually start in the liver so it might be elsewhere
	and I just didn’t know how to interpret that
so we can’t cure it but 
	they put these green leggings on me
we can give you the best possible life now
	well my legs were always my best feature
this is a student nurse working with us today
	all you gorgeous are so girls
she’s currently full code, we should discuss that because
	I wish they’d just tell us when the funeral will be
we are looking at days now, not weeks
	that’s the sign of the promised land 

Jeannie Prinsen lives with her husband, daughter, and son in Kingston, Ontario, where she works as a copyeditor for a local news organization. She can be found on Substack at https://substack.com/@jeannieprinsen.

Chapter 4, Ecclesiastes (translation)
by Burl Horniachek
 
And I returned and I saw all the oppression
that is done under the sun.
And, look, the tears of the oppressed
and they have no comforter.
In the hand of their oppressors, power,
and they have no comforter.
And I praised the dead, which are already dead,
more than the living which are still alive,
but better, better than both
is the one who has not yet been born,
who has not seen the evil work
which is done under the sun.
And I saw that for all his toil and all his skill in work
that a man is envied by his neighbor.
This also is wisp and chasing the wind.

A fool folds his hands and eats his own flesh.

Better one palm filled with quiet,
than both hands filled with toil and chasing the wind.

Then I returned and I saw all the wisp under the sun.
There is one alone and not two,
and he has no son or brother.
There is no end to all his toil,
neither are his eyes filled with riches.
For whom do I toil and deprive my being of good?
This also is wisp and evil misery.
Two are better than one
for they have a good reward for their work,
for if they fall, the one will lift up the other,
but woe to him who is alone when he falls,
and there is no one to help him up.
Also, if two lie together, they are warm,
but how can one alone be warm?
And if one overpowers him,
two can stand up against him,
and a threefold cord is not quickly broken.

Better a poor but wise youth
than an old but foolish king,
who will not anymore be warned.
For out of prison the youth comes to rule,
but then in his kingdom a poor man is born.
I saw all that lives, who walk under the sun,
with the second youth who is standing over him.
There was no end to all the people,
to all which came before him.
Also, they that come after him will not celebrate him,
for this also is wisp and chasing the wind.

Burl Horniachek is a Canadian teacher, poet and translator, and the editor of To Heaven's Rim, a major anthology of world Christian poetry. He was born in Saskatoon and grew up south of Edmonton. He studied Ancient Near Eastern Studies (Hebrew/Ancient Israel) at the University of Toronto and creative writing at the University of Alberta with Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott. He currently lives near Winnipeg, with his wife, a surgeon, and their two kids.

Stories of Durga: Differences
by Ayesha Chatterjee
 
His voice the vocals of a familiar song,
each word distinct. Behind him, drums:
new clothes, New Market, notun 
gurer sandesh. The muddy squelch of good

conquering evil. Still a messy business.
Still the mothballed, darkening chill.
Between victory and destruction, a lull.

Farmers, somewhere out of sight, reap 
their harvest, locusts--that other 
percussion--having done their worst and fled.
The faint, unshakeable smell of burning. 

Born and raised in Kolkata, India, Ayesha Chatterjee is the author of the poetry collections The Clarity of Distance and Bottles and Bones. Her work has appeared in Magma Poetry (UK), Exile Literary Quarterly (Canada), The Moth (Ireland) and elsewhere, and been translated into French, Slovene, Russian and Bengali. Several of her poems have been set to music by renowned Canadian composers. Chatterjee is a past president of the League of Canadian Poets. She lives in Toronto.

A.F. Moritz was interviewed by Bret van den Brink via a Zoom conversation in the spring of 2026.

Bret van den Brink, for Traces: From my understanding, you were born in the United States, but have been based in Canada, specifically Toronto, for some time – I was wondering if you could say something about how place impacts your poetry.

A.F. Moritz: Place is so important to anyone that it’s perhaps impossible to become fully aware of it. You can’t write the smallest poem without its being present. Even if unmentioned, it’s implicit. If you mention or are spurred by, for instance, somebody’s gesture in the street, the person’s whole world is “behind” what you write, just as your whole body is, whether you refer to these explicitly or you don’t. Place is even in the whole history of all the words we use, the way those words now have their particular shadings because of time and place, the way they exist now, in 2026, the way they are used here and a little differently there.

Place is a kind of noumenon that spreads out from the poem and touches us in everything, every phenomenon, of the poem, whether or not they are specifically about place. Compare enjoying the poem to enjoying yourself lying on the stream bank. Your head’s on the ground, you look to the side and see a little distance, a stretch of water, some grass. The horizon’s very near, but you “know” without thinking of it that the whole earth is there: your town that the stream flows through, the bit of woods where you lie but can’t see much of, are wholly there, and everything beyond them that has to be there, or else they could not be.

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Traces: What about “place” more specifically, particularly: for instance, that spot on a stream bank?

I grew up in Niles, Ohio, a small industrial town. It was a part of Big Steel when I was born in 1947 and in my childhood and adolescence, and then, by the mid-70s, it was the Rust Belt. The industry there had collapsed and even many of its ruins were being dismantled. The society there, which had always been full of conflicts and doubtfulness but was also proud and coherent, was also collapsing. Another important factor for me: growing up, there was absolutely no one I ever met who had the least interest in poetry – absolutely nobody ever. I was completely isolated as a poet till I got to university, and even then, because of my momentum of being completely isolated, I stayed completely isolated. It was the way I was. I kept poetry to myself. It took me a long time at university, years, years before I gradually admitted that I’d ever written a poem to anybody. […] I’m about the most isolated poet that I’ve ever heard of. I’m way more isolated than, for instance, Emily Dickinson was.

But I really, in a sense, loved Niles. You grew up in an awful place, and it ignored but at the same time tortured you, but at the same time, it had energy and splendor, and you owe it everything you are or have, including the good things. As a result, I’m kind of an aficionado of desolation. It’s almost as if my main calling is to find beauty in ugliness, to find centrality in the most marginal, to find eminence in what is most scorned, ignored, devalued.

So, how does that affect me? I wrote a book called Mahoning, which is about my area. Mahoning’s the river that goes through it. I made the Mahoning into a character—a river, and at the same time, a person, a people, and their place, including the natural place and the made place, the society they had made there. Mahoning is a beneficent and injured and hard-to-marry beloved. It’s a place. And, that book really attempts to look at this place as absolutely essential. Some people say the center of the human universe was Pericles’s Athens. Some people say it was Jesus Christ’s Palestine. I say they’re all wrong. It was Niles, Ohio in the 1950s and 60s. This was the essential humanity, which had never been reached before and will never be surpassed. But it was a crummy place, too.

So I tried, with the help of an idea from a philosopher, a theologian, Hans Urs von Balthasar – he wrote many thunderous big, long books. Well, I don’t mean to make fun of them, they’re great. But I took an aesthetic idea he has, of the gestural as symbolic and beyond-symbolic, as “incarnating” what it “indicates”, so that there is no difference between symbol, image, and “referred-to” reality. One of his examples, if I’m remembering correctly, is the idea of the slumping of Christ’s head in one of the Passion narratives. The idea is: in that one moment/movement is condensed death and life, defeat and triumph, misery and glory. They are not even “fused”, they are simply realized to be one and the same thing. I applied this to Niles and my life from and of the place. I tried to create an aesthetic method in that book which expresses this realization of oneness beyond all fusion, this primordial oneness of the outcast and the central, the ignored and the essential, the scorned and what is truly glory.

Traces: Thank you. That “fusion,” brings Blake’s “double vision,” and so Northrop Frye, to mind. […] Are there any Canadian artists or thinkers, Frye or others, that you particularly enjoy, or who have particularly influenced your work?

AFM: Oh, yeah. Certainly!, Frye was very important to me – is very important to me. I think he’s a magnificent philosopher and critic. For me he’s a philosopher, though he is taken as a critic of literature because he mainly communicates his thought through response to literature. This procedure is what leads to the best thought, the best philosophy. I like the way he looked at the Bible as a little library of about 70 pamphlets which, mysteriously, though written across about 3,000 years, all keep echoing and building on each other and referring to each other, and magically, they refer backward and forward – an idea of literature that Jorge Luis Borges was coming to, too, in the middle of the 20th century. It’s not only the past that influences the present, but the opposite.

I never met him but a personal aspect of my encounter with him does exist. I had loved Blake since I was 12 years old, when I began obsessively reading an ignored book that had come to a fancy book club an aunt of mine belonged to: W.B. Yeats’ famous anthology of Blake in a fancy blue-cloth gold-stamped edition. Then I arrived at university, and I soon encountered the book Fearful Symmetry by Frye. For about six months, I felt, oh, Frye is even more of a visionary than Blake! Then I regained my senses. But I loved and love Frye’s book. It’s had a great impact on me.

When I came to write my dissertation on the Romantic and Victorian poets, I followed a Frye-sort-of method, which was to do close reading, yes, but mainly to look at a sort of organic, over-times-and-periods unity of writers who were drawing on the past and reshaping the past to talk to their present. I associate this to Hegel’s idea that what acts at each moment is the total self, the total past, of the person up to that moment. This is an “of course” but it is also an essential poetic vision both for the understanding and the doing of poetry. It’s an essential reality.

Then I wound up in Toronto. And, where I lived, I would see Frye walking along the sidewalk, deep in thought, with a white plastic bag in his hand. Doubtless Mrs. Frye had told him to bring home some milk and bread from the Dominion grocery store there. And then, later on, I had an office in Northrop Frye Hall, so I thought, oh, this is a providential circle being closed here.

But the other thing about Frye is that he knew he had genius, and towards the end of his life, I believe he began to become a poet in his own right. He had his idea of four types of discourse. […] The final one was the kerygmatic. […] The prophetic is the poetic. The kerygmatic is even beyond that, because that’s where God talks to and through us. It is rarely achieved. Well, I think in his own private writings, especially in his late notebooks, he was trying to write a kerygmatic writing. He felt he was doing so. He wasn’t just a critic anymore. If he ever was just a critic, he was now specifically trying to do what he thought was kerygma as a form of literature.

Whether one looks at brief utterances in the notebooks, or the many statements one is struck by in reading his critical works, Frye seems to me one of the authors who greatly exemplifies the extreme closeness between a profound prose aphorism and a profound brief lyric.

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Traces: How does spirituality impact your work? We can say spirituality or religion, whichever you prefer. And how do artists from spiritual backgrounds or religious backgrounds impact it?

AFM: Spirituality is a central aspect of my poetry, so it more than impacts it. […] I think, one of the main things about modern intellectuality, at least of one stream of it, is the anguish over the loss of the hegemony of the spirit in the human concept of itself and its world. And the battle to restore the reality of spirit, which has entailed, often, a sense for a redefinition of it. How can what has traditionally been designated “spirit” be found and spoken today?

One of my favorite philosophers is Gabriel Marcel. He was an atheist up till the age of about 40, and then as the result of his thinking, he joined a church. He made this kind of progression. And, one of the things that he said in his attempts to identify a way to comprehend the reality of what seems totally impalpable and unlikely in a technological, empirical mindset and civilization – is that he regarded a lot of the critique of God in the 19th century as entirely proper. It really had destroyed a God that needed to be swept away, but it didn’t touch God at all.

Poetry [is], as it were, the better philosophy, the better theology, because poetry can and does say the ineffable by understanding how symbolism and rhythm and color and so on gesture to, indicate, sufficiently point to – insofar as humankind is capable of grasping – this other reality. This is one of the main subjects of my work. Let me just say one thing more on this.

The title of Wordsworth’s great poem referred to as “the Immortality Ode” for short is simply Ode, with the subtitle Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood. Okay – that subtitle in itself is a great poem. In a way, you don’t need any more than that. The first 3 words indicate one of the strongest, and I think, most central, truest efforts that exists in modern culture: intimations of immortality, as opposed to securely (almost arrogantly) asserted dogmatic, doctrinal statements of immortality, on the one hand, and equally dogmatic positivism and materialism on the other. Doctrinal statements are not worthless, but the modern human experience lies more with intimations of immortality. How do you establish the truth value and the reality for you, of the sense of immortality that you get and that is constantly contested, doubted? Well, I think this struggle is one of the major elements of poetry through the ages, from the most primitive times we know of. But it is, because of social and intellectual conditions, particularly sharp and crucial now.

Traces: Thank you for that. I love the Immortality Ode. […] While reading Great Silent Ballad, I was fascinated by your poem, “A Flower Giving Names to Adam and Eve.” In Genesis and Paradise Lost, Adam gives names to the animals, and in the latter, Milton adds that Eve named the flowers. So, I was wondering if you’d say something about the ecological vision of your poem, and the significance of naming and being named for you.

AFM: To me, that’s a very important thing. […] When I think of giving names, I think of Blake’s famous painting of Eve naming the birds: you refer to Blake’s source in Milton. There’s a loving and productive interchange between man and nature: that’s the first and simplest way to say my poem’s sense. I’m concerned to show, on behalf of fact and truth, and in contradiction to modern analytical intellectuality, that, in fact, names are part and parcel of things – that they aren’t arbitrary human constructions, and that they’re not just ciphers we’ve constructed and that are best understood as a kind of tool or technology for communication. That is wrong.

The fact that things have different names, and many different names, in different languages, is a point in that poem. The narrator says, Eve and I will be out here in the woods or in the fields. We’re taking a vacation or a walk. We’re not profound botanists, and we don’t know all languages. We don’t know “the name” of this flower we admire, but for the time being we’ll “invent” one, just for while we’re here. But—or, so—the flower is giving us its new, its one-time, name for just between us and it. When we go back, we might look it up. We’ll get the botanical name, and maybe all the folk names for it, and we might get so interested that we’ll find out the name for it in Urdu, if it grows in India. And its name in Bulgarian, Swedish, and so forth. We’ll find out what people may have called it differently in our great-great-grandmother’s time. And these will each and all be names of the flower that the flower gave and that are part of it. The flower is a fountain of names. It’s a fountain of provocation, of creativity, and every name it creates is its true name, just the same as it creates seeds and leaves.

Traces: Thank you for that. That’s beautiful.

In the contents of your recent collection Great Silent Ballad, the first poem is titled, “As I Write Down My Songs.” The poem doesn’t have the title on the page on which it appears, and its first line reads, “as I write out my poems.” That relates songs and poems very closely. What does writing poetry mean to you, and how does song relate to poetry in your work?

AFM: I always insist that poetry is basically song. I love Wordsworth’s term, philosophic song, for his long poems. It brings together two things – the idea of chortling like a bird and the idea of being a human being with a great intellect and a great responsibility to the intellect. This is a natural responsibility, a human responsibility to nature, which naturally provides man with intellect. Just as nature created the tiger with claws and the burdock with leaves, it created humans with the intellect. The intellect is a thing of nature, a human-natural thing. Nature needs to get something from humanity out of the intellect it has provided. In both senses of “needs”. Nature produced the intellect because it could not do otherwise: that’s what it needed to do, what it did. Nature requires assistance from the intellect to achieve its goals. I do not quail at the “anthropomorphism” of the last statement. Those terms are the ones that are precise to reality in this regard.

We have to be aware that we’re singing, and we have to try to form the song. The song is the fusion, or rather the primordial oneness, of intellect and feeling. Then, by entitling the poem “When I Write Out My Songs,” and then later, having it say (sing) “when I write down my poems,” I can bring out implicitly that the two statements are the same – that the making of the song very, very carefully at the poet’s desk, where getting it finally right may take years, is the same as the impulse, inspiration, moment of joy and rhythm and melody of the first appearance of the first phrase. Two ends of the same thing.

Another point about music. You might notice in the book you mentioned, Great Silent Ballad, that the name of the book contains a term for a genre of music in it, a genre of music that is equally a type of poem. In that book, in many places, I quote popular songs, folk songs, art songs, and I’ve done this continuously in my poetry. Songs are really part and parcel of me. I know hundreds of songs, some of them going back hundreds of years. And I like to sing them to myself. I refer also to orchestral music, or music without words, but vocal music, especially, is central to me.

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Traces: Thank you. When I was at your book launch for The Wren, one of the poems has the speaker at a mountaintop, and on the mountaintop, there’s a guitar. I’m recalling that correctly, right?

AFM: Yes, you are. He carries his guitar up the mountain to flee a burning city, and he stops while halfway up at a house that’s up there, a halfway house, you know. One of these little huts that is provided for travelers.

Traces: Would you say that the guitar is, for you, a modern version of the lyre, as it was for someone like Shelley or Stevens?

AFM: That’s right. It is the lyre. With of course the difference of feeling that our culture—Liona Boyd, Chet Atkins, Elmore James—has added to the sense of the instrument. It’s an instrument friend, an instrument traveler, that accompanies the poet. We think of the psalmist – “play for me on the psaltery, the 10-stringed instrument”.

We know that some instruments of ancient singers were essentially harps, and the harp too is like a guitar. Open strings – strings available to your hands. And, there’s the tradition of the blues man, someone like a Woody Guthrie or a Charley Patton. Or those who made that life a sort of mythology: Bob Dylan or the many other poet-musicians of the “folk revival” period. Even the rockers who have to plug in yet still have this idea of the free-wandering hero of the guitar. ‘I wander from town to town doing my show. I’m a kind of a vagabond minstrel.’

There’s a poem in Great Silent Ballad that centers in guitars, “Folk Blues,” which is about an old blues man. He and his old friends, also blues players, are accustomed to get together and beat on their guitars, to admire the tricks of each other’s fingers. Then they would talk a little, take a drink, go silent, stare across the shimmering water to think, and think nothing for a long time—sitting there on the Natchez side, looking across the Mississippi. That book is filled with little quotations, references to music, quotations from lyrics here and there.

Traces: Thank you for that. I suppose, now that The Wren has been mentioned, it’s a wonderful way to transition to my last question. You’re releasing two new works: a poetry collection, The Wren, and the translation of Eternities by Juan Ramón Jiménez ...

AFM: Eternities, yes. We were just talking about the guitar as a lyre, so let me see if I can’t quickly find the lyre in here.

Traces: Oh, marvelous.

AFM: Here it is. And it’s called, “With the Lyres of the Dream,” “Con Las Liras Del Sueño.” You’ll like this. The one thing it might be good to know about the poem in advance: “Moguer” is the name of Jiménez’s hometown.

I BEAUTIFIED my aspiration

with the lyres of the dream

and set out on my road to the world above.

And I found myself with the stars that,

seated on the azure stairs,

sway their legs, never ceasing,

like branches, in the Edenic air.

Among them, the unforeseen

depths were interchanging

their lights and their forms

in a succession impossible to define,

like the high swells of the seas

in the eternal afternoon sleep of Santiago.

I had arrived, and they, with their feet

kicked me in the soul

and fell down laughing;

and they threw me, screaming

with a crazy chatter of broken glass,

back into the tangled

day of Moguer impossible to wake up.

That’s the lyre. You soon leave the lyre behind. As the result of your efforts at beauty, you go up to the supernal, and you get kicked back down into reality. You have to learn the blues.

Traces: Thank you for that. I was wondering if you could say more about your hopes for the two projects, and how your work as a translator relates to your work as a poet?

AFM: It’s a big topic, so just let me choose one aspect, the short poem. The Wren is a little bit different for me, because it’s all very short poems. Translating Jiménez is one of the things that finally released me to do those, and to do a whole book of them.

I’ve always written short poems, and I have various English models for the short poem: English and American poets of all eras wrote them, and I always loved the Imagist movement that emphasized them: Hilda Doolittle, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and so on. From my early twenties I was deeply in love with the early work of Giuseppe Ungaretti and Salvatore Quasimodo. So, I’ve never been alienated from the short poem, but I felt it was not a principal métier for me.

I wanted to start translating Jiménez with his work of the period from 1915 to about 1935, when he wrote a great number of very short poems. Along with the Imagists and Ungaretti, Jiménez one of the chief creators of the early 20th century’s free verse revolution, in which the tiny, succinct, non-metrical poem was so big a part. Translating Jiménez must have caused it to gradually seep into me. Now, my poems don’t resemble Jiménez’s – they’re of a different type, but the length is somewhat similar.

I regard Jiménez as an extremely great poet. In English, if you look rather hard, you can find quite a few translations of him. But they haven’t been prominent, and for the reason that almost none of are consistently good. There are a few beautiful examples, but not a book you can read with thorough confidence. My goal would be—I don’t know if I can achieve it—to translate and publish a number of his books, as Edward Snow has done with Rilke. Jiménez is a poet of similar stature and importance. To me, he’s one of the – I don’t know – 10 or 20 principal writers of the 20th century in the European languages. A very important and very great poet.

So, I love his work, and that’s probably the main thing. I’m always fed by and challenged by his ideas, and his forms of verse, and simply the nakedness of poetry in his work—the powerful deep-going calm, the “dynamic ecstasy”, as he called it.

Bret van den Brink is a literary critic, amateur poet, and dabbler in theology. Some of the sundry venues that have featured his scribblings include Notes and Queries, Radix Magazine, Traces Journal, The Robert Graves Review, [spaces], The Merton Annual, and Christian Courier. He co-hosts the podcast Mandatory Media, and he is currently a PhD student in English at the University of Toronto.

Reviewed by Liv Ross

The Wren, A.F. Moritz’s latest collection from House of Anansi Press, is a challenging book of poetry, ready to reward the attentive reader. Attentiveness is a key characteristic for fully appreciating Mortiz’s The Wren, as reading this collection is very similar to birdwatching.

With patience and focus, the reader will uncover poems filled with epiphany and light, but these moments are fleeting, and, like the wren fluttering from branch to branch, what was previously grasped can be quickly and momentarily lost again.

This feeling is captured in the title poem, appearing in the last quarter of the book. In the poem, the narrator is watching a stand of young trees until he notices movement:

			From deep inside,
the smallest wren hops near, just to its edge,
and jerks and flutters, peering out, being glimpsed,
withdrawing again—into the thick of the doll forest
to be guessed there, its existence, the sighting of it
doubted, a legend of memories and hints.

This sense of watching, waiting, glimpsing, and losing cycles throughout the collection. At times, i can be a little bit disorienting. There is no obvious narrative throughline. No clearly felt rhythm. There isn’t even a table of contents to use as a roadmap. There is just a series of memories and hints to follow from page to page.

But while the poem “The Wren” captures the feeling of frustration and at-a-loss-ness of the collection, it also contains the key. The word “legend” in the final line could refer to doubt that precedes it, I suppose. One definition of the word is, after all, an unverifiable story. But “legend” can also mean the explanatory list of signs or symbols. There are memories and hints left behind by the sighting. Just so, there is an index of the poems, complete with their page numbers, after turning the page on the final poem.

Memories and hints—retrospection—are an important aspect of moving forward, of finding the bird again, but they do not bring ease or automatic success. Moritz does not pretend that they do. He, at times, seems to be just as stymied as the reader by this cycle of discovery and hiddenness. He states it in one of my favourite poems, “Attempted Retrospect”:

I’ve done the best I could
*
No, that’s not right either.

Two spare lines. The poem seems fatalistic, and it might have been if it had closed out the collection. As a final line, it seems like giving up, but since it comes only halfway through, there is a sense of picking up the pen and trying again. There is a back-and-forth with memory, trying to understand the past in order to navigate the future.

Hints and memories are borrowed from other writers, poets, and historical figures throughout this collection as well. The opening poem “Tieger, Tieger” looks to Blake’s “The Tyger.” “Henri Bergson” contemplates experience and understanding. Apollo retells the contest of Apollo and Marsyas. These reflections and callbacks interweave with the poet’s own questions and observations. They don’t quite form a roadmap, but they have a solidity to them, an importance. I am reminded of T.S. Eliot’s line, “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.” Some of the poems feel like fragments of a larger vision of the world. Take “Talking with Stones”:

every stone is a
head a
grave
stone
erased
heavy quiet
fall on your
knees bend bring
your face close to the
dirt kiss taste
what
things
are beneath
these lips
have
for the time
being
no words

The feeling and form of this poem is fragmented. It employs sudden and frequent enjambment. The picture it builds is incomplete. Something feels missing, but in the way that something feels missing from a ruin or a weathered memory. Despite the fragmented or out-of-grasp nature of the poem, Moritz bridges the form and content of his work and the world around him by mirroring the fragmented nature of reality in his work. The poem captures the feeling of sitting with an old and fading gravestone or a tumbled-down wall. The thing itself is incomplete, but there is much – even more, perhaps – to contemplate about it nonetheless.

Everything fades or falls to ruin. People die, castles fall, stories end, but there is always a new story beginning somewhere else. Someone will always be there to talk with the stones left in ruin. This might be especially the job of artists and poets – to enter into conversation with the ruins of our world –but this is no easy or simple task.

Poets and artists figure throughout the collection as speakers or subjects of Moritz’s poems. In “The Guitar,” a figure in the poem flees up a mountain to reach a cabin and escape from a burning city in its last days of war. He intends to play the guitar once he reaches the safety and quiet of the cabin, but finds that all he can do is sit and stare for a while. The guitar is ready to be played, but there must be time for silence first.

There is a lot of space and silence in The Wren. Most of the poems are very short. There is a lot of white space between them, and they demand that a reader take time with them. Pause and contemplate. Revisit and reimagine. Like the careful birdwatcher strolling through the woods, open to what he might see, these poems and fragments offer pieces and glimpses of a larger vision of reality. The pieces might be fragmented at times or difficult to enter, but sometimes the valuable treasures are the ones that require a bit of a fight.

Liv Ross is an urban monk, a poet, and essayist writing in and from the Ozarks. In addition to writing, Liv practices gardening, pipe-smoking, leather-working, music-making, and mischief. She has been published in The New Verse Review, The Front Porch Republic, Silence and Starsong, Solum Journal, and VoeglinView. She also serves as Managing Editor for Traces Journal. Her first book, The Blackbird Ballad, is scheduled for publishing May 2026 from Solum Literary Press. She can also be found on Instagram @liv_ross_poetry, or her substack, https://substack.com/@theabbeyofcuriosity.

A. F. Moritz has written more than twenty books of poetry, most recently, Great Silent Ballad (2024), As Far As You Know (2020), and The Sparrow (2018). Moritz served as the sixth Poet Laureate of Toronto from March 2019 to May 2023. He also served for more than a decade as the Goldring Professor of the Arts and Society at Victoria University at the University of Toronto. Moritz has received the Guggenheim Fellowship, inclusion in the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets, the Award in Literature of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and the Ingram Merrill Fellowship. He is a three-time nominee for the Governor General’s Award for English-language poetry (Rest on the Flight into Egypt, The Sentinel, and The New Measures). He was the winner of the ReLit Award for poetry in 2005 for Night Street Repairs. His collection, The Sentinel, a Globe and Mail Top 100 of the Year, won the 2009 Griffin Poetry Prize. And Great Silent Ballad received the 2025 Al & Eurithe Purdy Poetry Prize.

Week three of Issue 4 is here! This week, we have two book reviews to share, the latest dispatch of The Order of Love, ’s newest essay on Christian Canadian poets, and lots of fresh poems.

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New Poetry

This week, we’ve published new poetry by Ayesha Chatterjee, Pamela Mordecai, Taylor Marshall, Peter Stiles, & Brad Davis.

We hope you’ll share this week’s edition of Issue 4! See you next week!

Happy reading,

The Traces team.

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Marjorie Pickthall was the last of the Victorian poets. Victorian cultural values lasted notably longer in Canada, at least in places such as Toronto, New Westminster, and Victoria, than they did in the home country or the U.S. This was true of poetic styles as well. Pickthall herself was born in England in 1883, but moved to Canada as a child in 1890. This makes her a slightly younger contemporary of Americans like Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, and a slightly older one of T.S. Eliot and Marianne Moore. However, while Stevens, Frost, and Eliot were heavily influenced by the Romantic and Victorian poets like Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, Swinburne, and the Rossettis, they also, in various ways, very much departed from these predecessors and were clearly Post-Victorian in ways that Pickthall was not. Even older British poets, such as Kipling, Yeats, and Housman, who were born before her in the 1850s and 60s, but still writing at the same time, had also clearly moved on from the Victorians in ways she had not, even if they too kept to traditional forms. Further, the only very slightly younger Lawrence had already moved on to something extremely different. As we shall see, this does not mean that Pickthall did nothing new in her work, but her writing was obviously still in an older style.

Pickthall stated that she was most influenced by Swinburne and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, but her early work shows the influence of most of the other notable Victorian poets. Her earlier poems are reminiscent of William Morris, the early Yeats, and Patmore. This work is baroque, dreamy, bookish, indirect and verging on the decadent. It has great atmosphere, even if it lacks precision. Surprisingly, despite also being a devout Anglican, her early poetry was not particularly influenced by the other, more devout, and female, Rossetti. Pickthall would increasingly take Rossetti on as an influence in her later work, however, along with other Victorian and Romantic poets. Northrop Frye recognized a good deal of Browning in her verse drama The Woodcarver’s Wife, and Tennyson would also become an important model. Wordsworth and Shelley would become important, to go along with Blake, who was an earlier influence.

Pickthall most often writes rhymed poems in iambic pentameter or shorter lines, but she does use longer lines on occasion, usually in combination with shorter ones. All of these tend to be short lyrics rather than longer narratives. She went on to occasionally write blank verse, including in The Wood Carver’s Wife, but, though it is readable and fairly adept technically, like the rest of her unrhymed poetry, it is not especially memorable.

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Critics have noted that Pickthall had a restricted and conventional early life. She was raised as an Anglican and sent to various Anglican-run schools in Toronto. She was also somewhat sickly, suffering from severe headaches, and later dental, eye, and back problems, and thus did not immediately move out into a career. She also does not seem to have seriously considered marriage. Though living in a somewhat self-enclosed world, this seems to have been at least partially self-chosen. She would write about this reluctance to go out into the world in her Rapunzel poem “The Princess in the Tower”:

I was happier up in the room
At the head of the long blue stair
Than here in the garden’s gloom
With roses to wear.
When stars my window were riming
I would lean out over the snow
And hear him climbing, climbing
A long way below.
But I was happy and lonely
As the heart of a mountain pool,
With stars and shadows only
Made beautiful.

However, though not unhappy in semi-retirement, she was neither quaint, nor mentally fragile, nor sexless. She had strong opinions about many things and her letters feature ribald humour (including panty jokes). Furthermore, despite being a devout Anglican, she had no problem appreciating the work of intensely anti-Christian writers such as Shelley and Swinburne, even incorporating their critiques into her work. She eventually began to earn some money from her writing, mainly fiction, and would later take on some librarian work at Victoria University after the death of her mother. However, she would not truly escape from her somewhat cloistered existence until WWI.

Though she is sometimes seen as appealing to middlebrow Canadian readers, even the early Pickthall is hardly an uplifting or didactic poet. She is there for the pure singing, not moralizing. In her early work, she often centres on unsteady and in-between states, as in here, at the ending to “Dawn”:

O keep the world forever at the dawn,
Yet, keeping so, let nothing lifeless seem,
But hushed, as if the miracle of morn
Were trembling in its dream.
Some shadowy moth may pass with drowsy flight
And fade before the sight,
While in the unlightened darkness of the wall
The chirping crickets call;
From forest pools where fragrant lilies are
A breath shall pass afar,
And o’er the crested pine shall hang one star.

Appropriate to this, evening and sleep are also regular themes, as in the fittingly titled “Evening”:

Lovely the day, when life is robed in splendour,
Walking the ways of God and strong with wine,
But the pale eve is wonderful and tender,
And night is more divine.
Fold my faint olives from their shimmering plain,
O Shadow of sweet darkness fringed with rain.
Give me to night again.
Give me to day no more. I have bethought me
Silence is more than laughter, sleep than tears.
Sleep like a lover faithfully hath sought me
Down the enduring years.
Where stray the first white fallings of the fold,
Where the Lent-lily droops her earlier gold
Sleep waits me as of old.

Like many of the Romantics, her focus in these early poems is on the feeling provoked by object, not the object itself. Indeed, it is often difficult to see anything distinctly at all in Pickthall’s early poetry. Partly this is due to some of the excess adjectives: “shadowy moth,” “drowsy flight,” “crested pine” etc., but it is also due to a general imprecision. What does it mean that life is “walking in the ways of God, and strong with wine”? Then the eve is “wonderful and tender,” which sounds fine, but is a little empty, verging on cliche. Still, despite all this, the poems still do work. The atmosphere may be vague, but it somehow remains coherent.

Her religious poetry as well, is hardly an uncomplicated endorsement of conventional pieties. Rather, she was more interested in the flawed and incomplete, the things out on the edge. Here, for example, is her “Imperfection”:

Not the full splendour-roll
Of music echoing where the saints have trod
Summons me, O my soul,
So quick to God,
As the weak voices with their psalm unspoken,
Lost vision, stammering prayer,
And hearts long broken
That lift from earth to heaven His mercy’s stair.

There is also in the earlier Pickthall a tension between love of earthly beauty and love of God, a sense that one could love the things of the world more than their creator, as in these stanzas from “The Bridegroom of Cana”:

Sweet, I have waked from a dream of thee,—
And of Him:
He who came when the songs were done.
From the net of thy smiles my heart went free
And the golden lure of thy love grew dim.
I turned to them asking, “Who is He,
Royal and sad, who comes to the feast
And sits Him down in the place of the least?”
And they said, “He is Jesus, the carpenter’s son.”
---
The shaft of the dawn strikes clear and sharp;
Hush, my harp.
Hush, my harp, for the day is begun,
And the lifting, shimmering flight of the swallow
Breaks in a curve on the brink of morn,
Over the sycamores, over the corn.
Cling to me, cleave to me, prison me
As the mote in the flame, as the shell in the sea,
For the winds of the dawn say, “Follow, follow
Jesus Bar-Joseph, the carpenter’s son.”

Though there was a kind of tension between art and faith here, between love of God and love of the world, Pickthall did not put High Romantic self-assertion at the centre of her poetics, and so she did not seem to feel the same tension between the supposed egotism of creation and the humility of faith. She never felt the need to try and compete with God.

This also reflects a certain indirection in early Pickthall. In her earlier work, she tends not to directly express either religious devotion or erotic desire, though she was clearly indifferent to neither. There is a sort of endless beating around the bush, but, despite that, no fear or disgust (unlike Christina Rossetti, who expressed both her attraction to and repulsion from men in much more obvious ways in Goblin Market). Pickthall is not decorous either, affecting an innocence she does not have. Perhaps, as Northrop Frye suggests, her style is just what you get when you read too much Swinburne, or even too much D.G. Rossetti.

Pickthall did express her faith more directly in later poems, such as “Salutaris Hostia”:

All life’s splendour, all life’s pride,
Dust are they. I lay them down.
They were thorns that when You died
Wove for You a wounding crown.

Or “Resurgam”:

I shall say, Lord, “I have loved you, not another,
Heard in all quiet your footsteps on my road,
Felt your strong shoulder near me, O my brother,
Lightening the load.”

The more direct mode of expression in both these poems shows the increasing influence of Christina Rossetti, a poet whose influence on the earlier Pickthall was minimal. Though Christina was an intensely emotional poet, she was much less flowery and impressionistic.

Though somewhat of a miniaturist, Pickthall more than a few times moved into the prophetic. The large influence of William Blake on Canadian poetry mostly comes after Northrop Frye, but Pickthall was there first. Her most Blakean poem, “On Amaryllis,” is about a tortoise:

So dull, so slowe, so meeke I went
In my House-Roof that pay’d no Rent,
E’en my deare Mistresse guess’d no Spark
Could e’er enlight’n my dustie Dark.
    Judge not, ye Proud. Each lowlie Thing
    May lack the Voyce, not Heart, to sing.
    The Worme that from the Moulde suspires
    May be attun’d with heavenlie Quires,
    And I, a-crawling in my Straw,
    Was moved by Love, and made by Law.

It takes real vision to see heaven, not just in a wildflower, but in a land turtle. Blake had his sympathies with the lowlier creatures, but he was not one to typically see beauty in homeliness. That was all Pickthall.

Pickthall could also be somewhat frightened by the prophetic, however, as in her “The Little Sister of the Prophet”:

Will he come from the byre
With his head all misty with dreams, and his eyes on fire,
Shaking us all with the weight of the word of his passion?
I will give him raisins instead of dates,
And wreathe young leaves on the little red plates.
I will put on my new head-tyre,
And braid my hair in a comelier fashion.
Will he note? Will he mind?
Will he touch my cheek as he used to, and laugh and be kind?

She was both fascinated and wary of the ferocity that often comes with this mode, and, though she was no doubt thinking of certain Biblical prophets, Blake, in some of his fiercer moments, was no doubt on her mind as well.

Though Pickthall remained a devout Christian, she was, as mentioned before, capable of incorporating doubts and criticism into her religious work, as in “A Mother in Egypt”:

I have heard men speak in the market-place of the city,
Low voiced, in a breath,
Of a god who is stronger than ours, and who knows not changing nor pity,
Whose anger is death.
Nothing I know of the lords of the outland races,
But Amun is gentle and Hathor the Mother is mild,
And who would descend from the light of the peaceful places
To war on a child?

One might say that the gentleness of Amun and Hathor has more to do with Swinburne’s idealization of the pagan past than historical reality, but the whole poem still captures some of the unease that has been provoked by various Old Testament stories, even among the devout.

Though she never converted, Pickthall was one of those High Church Anglicans, like T.S. Eliot and others, with an intense interest in Catholicism. Her fascination with the Roman Church shows up in her several poems on North American Catholic missionaries, and in her verse drama The Wood Carver’s Wife, her tale of a French Canadian artist carving a pietà. More substantially, however, it appears in poems like “Salutaris Hostis,” her meditation on the Eucharist:

Hands of morning, take the cup
Whence the Life of Love is drained;
Hold it, raise it, lift it up
Till the lucent heavens be stained.
Joy and sorrow, lip to lip,
Lost in likeness at the end,
O my Friend,
Taste Thy wine of fellowship.
All life’s splendour, all life’s pride,
Dust are they. I lay them down.
They were thorns that when You died
Wove for You a wounding crown.
But the brier of death’s in bud,
All its loveliness he knows,
Sharon’s Rose,
That has shared Thy flesh and blood.

I suppose this might be shoehorned into some Reformed conceptions of real presence, but its bodiliness seems to fit much better with older and more visceral accounts. In any event, Pickthall does not seem to have been particularly interested in abstract theology. On another note, Pickthall here, not unsuccessfully, takes a little bit back from Shelley’s Adonais for Christianity. Life, for Pickthall, is not some monstrous companion of death, nor is it so dreadfully far away from heaven. The staining of eternity in the crucifixion is redemptive, and death and life have been intertwined and overcome by the resurrection.

Pickthall may have been a Victorian poet, but she was a Victorian poet transported into a new world. If this did not change the style in which she wrote, it did affect her subject matter. She wrote of North American missionaries, Native American peoples, and West Coast fishermen. And, not only are the persons depicted different from the English Victorians, but the landscapes in which they are placed are both vaster and less domesticated. There are still wild places in Britain, of course, but you have to go looking for them. In Canada, on the other hand, while there are a few major cities clustered in the south with some intensely cultivated, but often surprisingly small, areas surrounding them, great masses of relatively untouched wilderness are never too far away. I have mentioned her poems on North American missionaries, and here is an excerpt from her lyric on Father Jogues, the first Catholic saint to be martyred in North America:

Like the reed-feeding swans that cannot choose
But hear the voice of summer, in swift flight
Up from Three Rivers came the long canoes
Through calm of day and night,
I in the foremost, Coupil and Couture,
Whose fiery crowns are sure.
Sweet shines the summer over Normandy,
And bright on Aries among her blossoming vines,
But O, more sweet than any land or sea
The northern summer shines.
Each night a silvered dream to cast away,
Each golden dream a day—
So we went on, and our dark Hurons smiled,
Singing the child-songs of the woodpecker,
Through clear green glooms and amber bars enisled
Of tamarack and fir.
Till one cried, “Lo, a shadow and a dread
Steals from the isles ahead!”

And her poem on Chief Peguis, one of the first converts to Christianity in Western Canada:

Just where the ridgepole cleaves the blue
A star looks down on Pegowis,
And the star and the iris sky and the dew
And the kindly trees are his.
Nothing he does but lie in the sun
And dream of the deeds he used to do,
Of the raided herd and the buffalo run
And the thundering caribou.
Pegowis thinks no more on sorrow,
Pegowis neither is glad nor grieves.
His eyes are turned to the misty morrow,
His hands are like brown leaves.

The sea, and, in particular, the waters off North America, were, from the beginning, another important subject for Pickthall, as in her “Pieter Marinus”:

But let me lie awhile in these Thy seas.
Let the soft Gulf Stream and the long South Drift,
And the swift tides that rim the Labrador,
Beat on my soul and wash it clean again.
And when Thy waves have smoothed me of my sins,
White as the sea-mew or the wind-spun foam,
Clean as the clear-cut images of stars
That swing between the swells,—then, then, O Lord,
Lean out, lean out from heaven and call me thus,
“Come up, thou soul of Pieter Marinus,”
And I’ll go home.

Though beautiful, this is much more vague and general than her later sea poetry, unsurprisingly for a Toronto-raised poet who was taking things mostly out of Swinburne rather than direct experience. At the end of her life, Pickthall moved to the West Coast, often venturing quite far out along the coasts and away from cities like Vancouver and Victoria. Her poem on the graves of fisherman, “Ebb Tide,” is set in Clo-oose, a small village on the west coast of Vancouver Island, which she had visited:

Here he may lie at ease and wonder
Why the old ship waits,
And hark for the surge and the strong thunder
Of the full Straits,
And look for the fishing fleet at morning,
Shadows like lost souls,
Slide through the fog where the seal’s warning
Betrays the shoals,
And watch for the deep-sea liner climbing
Out of the bright West,
With a salmon-sky and her wake shining
Like a tern’s breast,—

Though Pickthall was unquestionably a North American poet, she did not take much from American poetry. The United States has its own vast wildernesses, but, while there is certainly overlap with the subject matter of an American poet like Longfellow, with his Hiawathas and Evangelines, she doesn’t seem to have paid much attention to him. Furthermore, while she wrote one verse drama, she never attempted any longer poems in the mode of Longfellow or Whittier. The one American poet she does seem to have taken an interest in was the proto-decadent Poe.

In addition to her adoption of new poetic influences, Pickthall’s later poetry reflects her increasingly direct contact with ordinary reality. Just prior to the First World War, she had moved to London in an effort to see the world and advance her writing career. When the war broke out, she more decisively put herself into the world in order to make a contribution to the cause. At first she trained to drive and repair vehicles, but when she failed to find a position as an ambulance or truck driver, she took up agriculture, and worked as a part-time secretary in agricultural administration and as a part-time gardener. Though she did not see combat, she was not unobservant of what was around her and this made it into poems such as “Marching Men,” written in a more direct style:

Under the level winter sky
I saw a thousand Christs go by.
They sang an idle song and free
As they went up to calvary.
Careless of eye and coarse of lip,
They marched in holiest fellowship.
That heaven might heal the world, they gave
Their earth-born dreams to deck the grave.
With souls unpurged and steadfast breath
They supped the sacrament of death.
And for each one, far off, apart,
Seven swords have rent a woman’s heart.

After the war, Pickthall’s later work also began to take in the lives of working people and the poor. The previously mentioned “Ebb Tide” is one example, but another is “The Tramper’s Grave”:

Perhaps his eyes in dream have seen
    Those low twin-hills that rise afar,
With soft blue breadth of sea between
    Reflecting one triumphant star.

Both “Ebb Tide” and “The Tramper’s Grave” show a turn towards Tennyson, with both particularly influenced by “Crossing the Bar.” However, we can also see the increasing influence of Wordsworth, with this passage from “The Tramper’s Grave” calling back particularly to “The Old Cumberland Beggar” and “My Heart Leaps Up”:

And he is one with leaf and blade,
    As changing seasons dawn again:
Kith to the far-flung clouds that fade,
    And brother to the silver rain.
Here, morn and eve, the blackbird sings,
    The strong-winged swallows wheel and dip;
And here all great and little things
    Go down the days in fellowship.

The turn towards grit and directness was never complete however. Shepherds also appear often in Pickthall’s work, but, even in the later poems, these tend to the more literary and more artificial side of the pastoral tradition, rather than the naturalistic, as in “The Singing Shepherd”:

O found you our belovéd ere the winds of morning found him
In the thickets by still waters where love is?
Did you know him from his fellows by the thorny bents that crowned him
Among the lily-gardens that are his?
O far away and far away from all the hidden meadows,
From the gardens where the year goes shod in gold,
I only heard a shepherd singing in the shadows
As he carried home the younglings to the fold.

What is still interesting about this poem, however, is how Pickthall folds both Psalm 23 and Song of Songs into the tradition. The poem tends to the hazy and atmospheric, and does not explicitly identify Jesus, the lover and the shepherd, but there is quite a suggestive mingling of the natural, the spiritual and the erotic nonetheless.

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It is sad that Pickthall only lived until 38. Under the influence of Wordsworth, Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, and others, she was moving towards a more direct and, in my opinion, more powerful mode of expression. Though ultimately still a fairly minor poet, Pickthall has real charm and sometimes even real emotional depth. Unlike slightly earlier Canadian poets such as Archibald Lampman, who often reads simply like a mash up of poorly digested bits of Wordsworth and Keats, she is not derivative. Her decision to throw herself into the full breadth of the Victorian and Romantic tradition means that her can never be reduced to a copy of some narrow bit of it. She is a unique sensibility and worthy of finding readers, particularly those with any interest in the origins of Christian poetry in Canada.

Used copies of her 1936 Complete Poems (2^nd Ed.) and the 1957 Selected Poems are available for purchase online. The Selected Poems is also easily available online here.

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Burl Horniachek is a Canadian teacher, poet and translator, and the editor of To Heaven’s Rim, a major anthology of world Christian poetry. He was born in Saskatoon and grew up south of Edmonton. He studied Ancient Near Eastern Studies (Hebrew/Ancient Israel) at the University of Toronto and creative writing at the University of Alberta with Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott. He currently lives near Winnipeg, with his wife, a surgeon, and their two kids.

Reviewed by Jack Green

Reviewed by Jack Green

Are you ready for the Apocalypse? That is one of the questions Michael D. O’Brien pursues in his latest novel Letter to the Future. Indeed, it is one that resounds through most of O’Brien’s novels, particularly the Children of the Last Days series. In this latest work, he voices the question through two letters written by Cleveland (Cleve) Longworth to the ‘children of the future’ – those living after the apocalyptic ‘catastrophe’. These letters are discovered in Part I, some centuries after they had been written, by children belonging to that new age. Translated by an ingenious priest from the English in which they were written to the unnamed language of this new age, the letters record Cleve’s version of the events that radically alter the world, history, and every human heart.

In the first, longer letter (Part II), Cleve records something of his life leading up to the ‘catastrophe’, but focuses on the two days which initiated the new age. Civilisation collapses at some velocity during those days, though through a cause unnamed. This is deliberate: O’Brien attempts in the novel, as in others, to steer attention away from the material causes of history to the spiritual principles at work and the drama played out in the heart of each character. We are given some insight into this in Cleve himself and in the mixed bag of strangers and friends that he accumulates as he seeks shelter from the cosmic disturbance.

The second, shorter letter (Part III), something of a post-script to the first, contains the reminiscences of Cleve at the end of his earthly days, turning over in his memory the decades

that followed the catastrophe. Here we follow the purgation, consolidation, and propagation of Cleve, his family, and his fellow apocalyptic sojourners as they build, under a new heaven, a new earth. O’Brien leaves it to us to fill in the timeline from Cleve’s small, post-Apocalyptic community to the children of the future who discover his letters, though there are a few clues of continuity sprinkled throughout the novel – not least that the children who discover the letters are Longworths. Rather than offer a neat chronology, O’Brien leaves us with some “ultimate thoughts” about Providence, our place in it, and “God’s will for us.”

Some readers, it is true, may perhaps find the Christian themes too ‘on the nose’ and lacking a certain degree of subtlety. For example, the ‘holocaust’ – one of the harrowing apocalyptic events unleashed upon Cleve and company – is an imaginative redescription of the dubious Three Days of Darkness prophecy, usually accredited to Italian mystic Anna Maria Taigi. Its presence is barely concealed. Furthermore, O’Brien’s theological and philosophical musings, which permeate earlier novels, have a less ponderous pace and contemplative tone here (despite the philosophical Rafe, Cleve’s boss, mentor, and friend); most of the conversions that occur in the novel, for example, do so in but a few lines, and even Cleve’s feels fast. The theological, at times, lacks finesse.

However, O’Brien has always foregrounded thick Christian themes. The imaginative labour is, for him, a fruit of contemplation, which does not occur in a vacuum but rather in a Catholic Tradition mediating forms and figures to him, which inevitably spills over into poesis. In that sense, the novel, and much of O’Brien’s literary work, is a counter-weight to the silencing of theological themes in famous dystopias of the previous century. Such silence, in its own way, is a most disturbing dystopia, which O’Brien robustly rejects.

That said, I would submit that this is not O’Brien’s most skillful work of Christian art. As the title suggests, time and history are recurring themes, but the timing of the narrative is arbitrary and uneven: we are thrown forward centuries in Part I, then pulled back to something like our present and held, over most of the novel, for but a few days with Cleve. Then, almost as if the narrative has lost steam, we skip over the remaining decades of Cleve’s life in the concluding post-script. The temporal jolting serves no discernible purpose, and it may have proved better for O’Brien to offer a novel of a more characteristic length. This would have allowed him time to develop some of his more interesting characters (like Rafe) and themes (shelter) with the sophistication and subtlety that one is used to with O’Brien. Too much is too cursory, and while the Apocalypse would understandably provoke haste, O’Brien has been able in other apocalyptic novels (most famously Father Elijah) to mix pace and depth quite evenly. To get a better sense of O’Brien’s tremendous skill as a Christian writer, one would be better to look to his Children of the Last Days series.

Nevertheless, O’Brien knows how to get a reader to turn the page, and this is undoubtedly a page-turner. All the while one is provoked to wonder where this world is heading, where it could go (and is going) wrong, and, more provocatively, whether one is prepared to live under Providence. O’Brien does a fine job to frame this without fear, but in peace and simplicity, speaking of such a life, in one of the most beautiful phrases of the book, as “doing the duty of the moment.” The work may not be one of O’Brien’s best, but it is a book for this moment and for the children of this age.

Jack Green holds degrees in philosophy from the University of Notre Dame (Australia) and degrees in theology from the Sydney College of Divinity and the University of Oxford, where he is currently completing a DPhil in theology.

Michael O’Brien, iconographer, painter, and writer, is the popular author of many best-selling novels, including Father Elijah, Strangers and Sojourners, Elijah in Jerusalem, The Father’s Tale, Eclipse of the Sun, Sophia House, The Lighthouse, and Island of the World. His novels have been translated into twelve languages and widely reviewed in both secular and religious media in North America and Europe.

Reviewed by Liv Ross

When I first pick up a book of poetry, I like to spend some time with the cover and the table of contents to get myself familiar with the art and feel of the book: the way the poet decided to break and name sections, the titles of the poems themselves. This helps give me a guide to what story the poet is spinning throughout the collection, if they are spinning one at all. One blurb told me McCaslin was exploring identity and significance in these poems. I saw several anchoring points to ancient myth and story with titles like Selene Disappearing, Merkabah Mystic, Gaia, Inanna, and This Time Persephone Draws Demeter Back. Throughout, I spied several references to historical figures such as Copernicus, Lao Tzu, and Nefertiti. There were also many poems dedicated to birds, trees, and other members of the natural world. The collection of 78 poems is broken into three sections: Naming, Naming & Unnaming, and Named & Nameless. There was a tide-like cadence to this, and a progression that I found intriguing. All of these facets interested me deeply as I began to read the collection.

When I dug into the poetry itself, I found that it was made up of free verse poems which deal sincerely with their subject matter. Whether McCaslin encounters a woman’s morning routine, a particular penmanship, or a Northern Flicker, she seems to attend to the subject carefully. Attention is a critical skill for a poet, and McCaslin has it for the world around her, but I didn’t find this care quite extended to the form of the poems she produced, either individually or in the collection as a whole.

While the collection was broken into three distinct sections, I couldn’t find any thematic clues as to why poems were placed into the sections they were. The poems could have been placed in a completely different order, and I don’t think I would have noticed an effect on the overall composition of the collection. The cover art and summary, and the poem titles had so many themes of light and dark, gaining and losing identity, history and the present day. I was expecting to be taken on a sort of katabasis. It is true that I found elements of that in individual poems, most obviously in the lyrics to Inanna and Persephone. The final poem in the collection “Inanna Enters Oneness” has this, and would have made a decently strong ending if I felt the journey to get there had been a little more thoughtfully laid out.

I noticed that the subjects of the poems tended to fall into one of three categories: interior contemplation, natural world observations, and mythological reflections. They were scattered throughout all three sections. The collection might have been served by grouping them together in a kind of rippling pattern, inward to outward, or removing the sections altogether to communicate the interweaving of person, nature, and story.

For the individual poems, as I said, the care and attention given to the poetic subjects often didn’t extend to the crafting of the poem itself. More than one reads like fragments gesturing toward a poem rather than something complete.

Some of this, I did feel, was an intentional stylistic choice from McCaslin. Aside from titles and epigraphs, there are no capitals or punctuation present in the poetry. These are free verse poems entirely, with one instance of a nod at rhyming in “From the Great Above She Sets Her Mind on the Great Below”:

she doesn’t do it for glory
doesn’t go down for fame
it isn’t for enlightenment
she lays her hands in the flame
stumbles alone down the stairway
stripped of her lapis and crown
stands bereft in the darkness
deep in the darkness is bound

The poem goes on for six more unrhymed couplets, but there were no other instances of rhyme, and none at all of meter. Neither in this poem nor in the collection as a whole. The general lack of structure and a tendency to list objects or feelings made several of these poems feel more like a series of observations that could turn into poems if given a little more time and thought. Take the poem “To What Is”:

open us to our nonhuman siblings
who share with us this blue sphere
owl   whale of wide-lunged passion
wolf of burning mandala eye
walk to a field where we are
fleshed   blessed
falling waiting
in a transparent ring
a garden
of humus, water, air, fire

There are flashes and images, but nothing to really help it all cohere.

“Selene Disappearing” is another poem that starts with some strength, and its issues illustrate the pattern across the collection. It is almost a palindrome poem.

calls
up
a deeper
ethos
where beauty
still transmogrifies
the mooning
heart
still drifts
where beauty
ethos
a deeper
up
calls

It is almost a concrete poem, with the visual sense of the waxing and waning of the moon, but the poem doesn’t quite commit to this. The middle three couplets throw it off. It is almost an ekphrastic poem, and it works harder to achieve this. The final five lines are exact reversals of the starting lines, but meaning is sacrificed for the aesthetic. The ideas are interesting, but ultimately incomplete in their execution.

I do want to give credit to several instances of fun word play: “a tree whose only sentence is sentience” in “Who Is She?,” or “on tables and tablatures of the sky” in “Lined Visage,” or “writing rights and singing” in “Her Childish Left-handed, Back-handed Script.” The use and placement of these kinds of word pairings linger as they close out their poems, helping them stick a little more in the memory, and even lending some strength where the rest of the poem is a little thin.

I re-read this collection a handful of times because of these flashes of interest and care. I hoped that re-reading might help pull them together into something cohesive that I had missed the first time. It just never quite managed to do so. There are diamonds here, but they remain rough and half-buried.

Bio of Reviewer: Liv Ross is an urban monk, a poet, and essayist writing in and from the Ozarks. In addition to writing, Liv practices gardening, pipe-smoking, leather-working, music-making, and mischief. She has been published in The New Verse Review, The Front Porch Republic, Silence and Starsong, Solum Journal, and VoeglinView. She also serves as Managing Editor for Traces Journal. Her first book, The Blackbird Ballad, is scheduled for publishing May 2026 from Solum Literary Press. She can also be found on Instagram @liv_ross_poetry, or her substack, https://substack.com/@theabbeyofcuriosity.

Bio of Author: Susan McCaslin is a poet living near Fort Langley BC who has been writing since the age of twelve when she discovered the magic of poetry and the power of poetic language. She is drawn to ancient mythologies and the mystical traditions of many cultures and religions and experiences poetry as musicality arising from silence. She has authored nineteen volumes of poetry and twelve chapbooks.

“And also the idea that if you obey the impulses of your emotions, that will lead you to truth.”

“Yeah.”

“So it’s kind of bizarre, isn’t it, that simultaneously it’s an age of reason, but it’s also an age of intense feeling.”

“So those things are in tension.”

“Well, there is a tension there, but there seems to be an assumption that there isn’t.”

These are Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland discussing an aspect of the French Revolution in an episode of their spectacularly successful podcast The Rest is History. This segment sketches part of the milieu of the 1780’s, though arguably that milieu encompasses a significantly longer stretch of time.

One challenge is to identify what the description helps to characterize. Is it the psychology of the era? Does that psychology apply to specific individuals, or is there a body politic to which one can ascribe psychological forces? Then again, perhaps the description captures intellectual developments, including quite specific philosophical arguments? Or is there, yet again, some other entity such as “culture” or Zeitgeist (spirit of the age) to which the notion of reason-and-emotion-in-tension gives access? Perhaps it might apply in one way to the aristocracy and in another to the masses?

In the podcast, the sketch in these terms lasts for only a few moments of an hour-long episode of an eight-part series that covers the beginning phase of an episode in French history to which they will devote two further multi-part series. Far be it from these historians to overplay their hand in one direction. They are nothing if not measured when it comes to the complex, manifold causes, events, and consequences of the French Revolution in Western European and world history.

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Nonetheless, they give a significant nod to love-and-reason-in-tension. They will do further work along these lines too, for instance when Tom discusses the ideals of the Revolution and makes the case that abstract nouns (like liberty, equality, and fraternity) matter. The notion of reason and feeling in tension likewise would seem to matter. At the very least, the construct serves as a sign of the complexities and even the apparent contradictions of the time period. It serves as a warning in the study of this history and in the study of history generally to account for rather nebulous factors among others like the price of bread, the influence of the printing press, the weather, factionalism, personalities, and so on.

In as succinct and suggestive a way as possible, Sandbrook and Holland want to draw attention to the paradoxical nature of the intellectual and psychological forces at play in the sphere of French politics in this time period. The phrase “The Age of Reason” is iconic. It refers to an increasing trust among many Western European intellectuals in humanity’s own resources, especially over and against superstition, tradition, and religion. Descartes championed the thinking self (“I think, therefore I am”) and later Kant identified a motto for the Enlightenment (Sapere aude! Dare to think!).

Some of the same intellectual forces led to developments in different directions, including an increased emphasis on naturalism, emotion, sensibility (awareness of the senses over and against the intellect), and bodily expression. A leading influence along these lines was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who wrote about the social contract in keeping with a commitment to individualism and naturalistic ideals in education.

This tension leads Dominic (in particular) to present an arresting thesis about Marie Antoinette. Her own adherence to the cult of sensibility complicates the standard narrative. The latter embellishes her disdain and detachment, her treacherous manipulation of people and circumstances as an Austrian outsider, even (in the language of the day) accusations of her unnatural relations. For Dominic and Tom, her commitment to the cult of sensibility undermines a caricature that reduces her to an aristocratic figure of contempt.

Part of the cultural work of love-and-reason-in-tension is to contribute to historical explanation well-told. If we were to imagine a spectrum with analysis of reason in the thought of Descartes and Rousseau at one end and pacy storytelling at the other, we could readily agree that the trope in the hands of The Rest is History serves the latter effect more than the former. It functions especially well rhetorically. At the same time, it encourages the curious listener to undertake further investigation for themselves.

Holland and Sandbrook understand, perhaps intuitively, that a little goes a long way. They also recognize that a tension between reason and emotion or sensibility has inherent value. It helps explain the circumstances. The construct is also identifiable to their intended audience: it’s the water we swim in. I find myself wondering, does love-and-reason-in-tension come to life in a particular way among the ideals of liberty, republicanism, and individual rights of the French Revolution? Is it a marker of our deepest held Western political assumptions?

The Museum Of Good Tries
by Brad Davis
 
“there is only the trying”

Like every last second dropkick that splits the uprights.
Or the glorious fifth section of Eliot’s East Coker.
Or Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 in C minor.
I nominate J. Berryman’s Eleven Addresses to the Lord,
and leave his Dream Songs for another’s vote.

I wonder, when the One who made me well
makes all things new, whether there will be a museum
on that fine earth for revisiting our best attempts.
The list of what would fail to qualify feels endless: like
whatever aims at contravening Creator’s will

to right all earthly wrongs and thereby free the cosmos
for continuing on its course toward divination.
Or is it flattery to attribute to our infinitesimal kind
the power to hold it back? Then why else the Incarnation?

Brad Davis is a Canadian-American poet living in northeastern Connecticut. Poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Vallum, Traces, Image, Poetry magazine, The Paris Review, JAMA, Puerto del Sol, Brilliant Corners, Spiritus, and many other journals. Brad’s most recent collection is On the Way to Putnam: New, Selected, & Early Poems (Grayson, 2024).

Writing the River
by Peter Stiles
 
(after a poem by Luci Shaw of the same title written soon after her sad loss)

I read this poem so many times, imagining you by Beaver Creek,
     the overflowing river rushing by your cabin.
I hear the torrent, like a metaphor, 
     cascading over rocks by night and day,
          signalling a movement on from loss, the singleness of sorrow.
Few years have passed since he has died, and now
     you stoke the woodstove on your own, chopping wood,
          splitting kindling, as dreams and memory mingle.
I read this poem so many times, the silence in your writing,
     the will to keep on flowing, like this river, window open,
         seasons knowing, change in Beaver Creek, 
            sometimes slowing to a trickle over pebbles
               summer’s showing, in water like dark tea.
I read this poem so many times, fine metaphor of sadness,
     pitting self against the years to come, alone by Beaver Creek,
          this liquid poem keeps speaking.
I read this poem so many times, imagining your grieving.

Dr. Peter Stiles graduated from Macquarie University with a Bachelor of Arts and a Master of Arts in English Literature. He then undertook a Master of Education degree at the University of NSW. After pursuing theological studies at Regent College, Vancouver, he completed a Doctorate in Literature and Theology at the University of Glasgow. His present role is Senior Lecturer in Education at Excelsia University College, Sydney. Peter has also lectured at Trinity Western University in Vancouver and Houghton College, New York. He has published three collections of his verse, entitled ‘Trumped by Grace’ (2015), ‘Surprised by Jack’ (2022) and ‘Galilee’ (2025). ‘Trumped by Grace’ was shortlisted for the Australian Christian Book of the Year.

Flowers in Bramble
by Taylor Marshall
 
     -   For Ann

Pale pink, deep magenta, dazzling white.
See the supine yellow buds peeking out
from a grainy, pollen centre.
The heavy blooms,
you’d think they’d droop to the earth,
But they exude, push, expand
their petals upward. Yet still,
recumbent angels,

opening from the grounding force
of their strong, verdant columns.
I help you water before supper at dusk.
It is the end of July, and the 
evening is slow and heavy with heat.
80% thunderstorms, tonight
rings out on the AM radio:
Tornado watch for Coronach.

School’s out, my wildness in bramble.
I am weightless, I am rooted.
Only your voice (diaphanous);
your home (cocoon);
your cooking (succour);
your hollyhocks (paragons);
buoy and anchor,
lift me up and then bind me
to the delicious dirt between
my toes. 

Your garden is your pride.
Saintly, seraphim vines of ivy cover
the fence as people stop in awe,
stare, and (if you have your way)
stay for a coffee and a chat.
The envy of all of Willowbunch.
This is not hyperbole, nor legend.
Even the Giant would be impressed.
Your maiden name was 
Flowers, after all.

Taylor Marshall is an emerging writer from Regina, Saskatchewan on Treaty 4 lands. Her work has appeared in Pinhole Poetry Press, Spring Magazine Vol.14, [S P A C E] Magazine, and Acta Victoriana Literary Journal. Her debut poetry chapbook, “Transits,” was self-published in 2024. Taylor’s writing often ruminates on mercurial possibilities of selfhood along with the accompanying internal and external metamorphoses reflective of grief, change, and rebirth.

Mad Gals
by Pamela Mordecai 
 
why a child of thirteen, 
maybe fourteen, 
her blood just managed, 
her eyes never scandalized 
by a man’s nakedness? 
why give a teenager dread 
work carrying a belly
through the neck-jerking 
natter day by day ballooning
of her baby bulge?

the fancy messenger
made up for it, did he?
that’s assuming he came
in frippery. those guys
have been known to arrive
looking well very earthy

baby-making might 
have cost her life and limb 
death by stoning prescribed 
for both adulterous 
parties by Deuteronomy 
and Leviticus she 
standing in the door
of her father’s house
and him? well nowhere
near most of the time

as in this case he was not... 

God Almighty making 
a joke as so often
knowing most 
of us won’t get it...

wouldn’t someone older
with a bit more experience
have been less at risk?

but maybe recklessness 
was the point
Eve one kind 
of mad gal
Mary another?

Pamela Mordecai is a Jamaican Canadian poet who often writes in Patwa or Creole inflected English. She writes across genres — long fiction, short fiction, poetry, plays, non-fiction — for children and adults. She has published nine books of poetry, most recently A FIERCE GREEN PLACE (New Directions, 2022) and DE BOOK OF JOSEPH (Mawenzi House, 2022), third in a series in Jamaican Creole about the life and death of Jesus, DE MAN and DE BOOK OF MARY being the first two books. All three books are subtitled: A PERFORMANCE POEM.

1 September 1864

Small Indian kite. Sunbird.
by Ayesha Chatterjee
 
One named for god, the other 
borrowed from the sun. Both 
female, perhaps. Myth 
and religion would recoil, yet 
here they are.

She whinnies as we imagine 
god might do, a thin, 
cold cry. 
		The sun slips
like a leaf. She sings too.

I'm not wanted here, 
the terrace shining in the dry 
March morning, a pair of stone 
eyes (not just govinda but also 
pariah) circling steadily above me 
until everything is as it should be.

Born and raised in Kolkata, India, Ayesha Chatterjee is the author of the poetry collections The Clarity of Distance and Bottles and Bones. Her work has appeared in Magma Poetry (UK), Exile Literary Quarterly (Canada), The Moth (Ireland) and elsewhere, and been translated into French, Slovene, Russian and Bengali. Several of her poems have been set to music by renowned Canadian composers. Chatterjee is a past president of the League of Canadian Poets. She lives in Toronto.