The Wren - by A F Moritz (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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

Review Quotes

"Moritz reminds us that poetry, at its best, renders visible small, wonderful scenes that might otherwise be forgotten, doubted, or overlooked." -- Literary Review of Canada

"A book of instances and increments, The Wren is Moritz at his most molecular: the spider web shining against the night sky, holding within its small pattern a truth to the greater harmonies of the stars." --Khashayar Mohammadi, author of Book of Interruptions

"[Moritz's] poetic skill and philosophical contemplation show the hand of a master at ease with his craft." -- Quill & Quire, STARRED Review