Great Silent Ballad: Poems by A.F. Moritz (House of Anansi Press, 2024)
Reviewed by Bret van den Brink
A Gate to an Echoing Green: A.F. Moritz’s Great Silent Ballad
I find myself uncertain about how to begin my review of A.F. Moritz’s poetry collection, Great Silent Ballad. Quite simply, it is beautiful. I want my opinion about that to be clear before I move on to what follows, since, to give my review a definitive scope, I have decided to focus on the role of poetic echo in the collection. Such a focus is, perhaps, perilous. As Northrop Frye wrote in his Anatomy of Criticism, “Demonstrating the debt of A to B is merely scholarship if A is dead, but a proof of moral delinquency if A is alive,” and, since Moritz is very much alive, I suppose I am putting my moral delinquency on full display in what follows.
Some poets are sensitive when one brings up their poetic debts, but I suspect Moritz isn’t among them. He is not afraid, on occasion, to wear his echoes on his sleeve, as it were; John Milton and William Blake are all but summoned by name early in the collection in the poem “Beyond.” A creative indebtedness to Wallace Stevens is signalled by the allusion to “Anecdote of the Jar” in the opening of “There Is Still.” Reading the collection as a whole, I have the sense of reading someone with a deep possession of the wide range of the English lyric (additionally, there are allusions beyond my ken to works in other languages). I do not mean that Moritz’s poems are derivative, much less that they are unoriginal, but that they are written by somebody who might say about the whole tradition of English lyric what Petrarch said about Virgil, Flaccus, Severinus, and Tullius: “I have thoroughly absorbed these writings, implanting them not only in my memory but in my marrow” (Rerum Familiarum Libri). Such possession enables, as John Hollander describes in The Figure of Echo, “a way of alluding that is inherently poetic, rather than expository, and that makes new metaphor rather than learned gestures.” The margins of my copy are scrawled with the names of those I heard echoed: Shelley, Tennyson, Dickinson, Whitman, Yeats, Eliot, Stevens, among many others. A Romantic, in a broad sense of Romantic, undersong hums palpably throughout the collection, as it deals with its subject of belief and unbelief, of love and society, and of the role of the literary arts.
The collection explores this subject matter, itself of great interest, with great energy. I find myself driven from line to line and poem to poem with an onward force, which is sometimes strong and sometimes gentle, but always present, and always new. In “July Mountain,” Wallace Stevens tells us that we live “[i]n an always incipient cosmos”: such, I believe, is the cosmos in which Moritz’s collection lives, and moves, and has its being. In its opening lyric, Moritz expresses the
longing
For a beginning that is not a longing
To begin, a dawn to be dawn not dawn’s herald.
It is an audacious desire, perhaps, to be the sun itself and not the morning star; Milton’s Satan expresses something like it in the opening of Paradise Lost’s fourth book, but there is nothing Satanic in Moritz’s expression. There is too much goodness, too much hope for that.
In Great Silent Ballad there is a persistent sense of a doorway opening before us, welcoming us to pass through. These passageways, I believe, are High Modernist in origin, related in part to those of Stevens and Eliot, such as the former’s “gate / To the enclosure, day” in “The Rock” and the latter’s “door we never opened / Into the rose-garden” from the Four Quartets. Thus, in Moritz’s “Dancer Speaking,” the speaker says,
I wish we could pass away
into the moonlight beyond the doors
open to a deserted garden.
This movement into or through something just further ahead is one of the essential movements in the collection’s poems, but there is a contrary movement as well:
but we go back
to the browning rind,
home, arguing, our doors slamming.
That “browning rind” is reminiscent of Keats’s celebration of process in “To Autumn,” but with the quarrelling and the slamming of doors one senses that the Keatsian ripeness has passed to rot, the lovers becoming like Stevens’s “Two golden gourds distended on [their] vines,” which, “Distorted by hale fatness, turned grotesque” (“Le Monocle de Mon Oncle”).
This troubled ripeness returns in “Word and Silence: After Neruda,” where the speaker claims, “My hands in this emptiness gather / bunches of grapes.” The poem beautifully evokes the Johannine Logos, “the Word was made flesh” (John 1.14), who promises water which quenches all thirst and springs “up into everlasting life” (John 4.14). The poem enacts a delicate dance of faith and doubt, and one senses, just over the horizon of the poem, the presence of something like Stevens’s sense of destitution in “The American Sublime”:
The spirit and space,
The empty spirit
In vacant space.
What wine does one drink?
While Moritz’s poem ends without knowing “who” is “picking petals” from “the silence on high,” one feels that somebody is there, dwelling behind, or perhaps within, the silence, just as there are bunches of grapes to be gathered in the emptiness. Sacramental possibilities endure, and when one reads of the speaker reaching out their “hands” to “gather” the grapes of sacramental wine, one hears an echo of Emily Dickinson: “The spreading wide my narrow Hands / To gather Paradise.” (Moritz will use the first line of the same lyric, “I dwell in possibility,” to open “Householder” later in the collection.)
Instances of echo, loud or faint, conscious or unconscious, abound, and while I would not find it tedious to go on and on, I suspect that such elaborations would bring me beyond the scope of a brief review. Some of the poems touch me so deeply that I find myself unable yet to articulate their impact: “The Baptist” from towards the end of the collection is among them. The last poem of the collection, “Elsewhere,” pains and bewilders me. To close, allow me to quote from “After Tagore”: “O my friend. O my belovèd. My door / is open. Don’t pass by me like a dream.” Reading lines like these, I feel the weight of literary history, the sense of an echo that I cannot quite place.
Tennyson uses the phrase “O my friend” in both In Memoriam A.H.H. and The Princess. But there seems to be something more, as when Whitman transmutes the spiritual eros of the Song of Songs into intimate gesture, as though he would embrace his reader. Pondering over such lines, I feel as though a door is opening before me, and though I cannot say what lies beyond, I have a strong urge to cross the threshold and find the place from where the echoes come.
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.
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.
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