How to Be Born Again

Peter Baltensperger is the editor and publisher of Moonstone Press and
the author of Arcana.

How to Be Born Again is an interesting and richly varied collection of
new work by the Ottawa poet and winner of the first Archibald Lampman
Poetry Award. Divided into three sections, “Famous Lovers,” “Comet
Music,” and “The History of the Future Tense,” the poems cover a
wide range of subjects from marital and familial relationships, to
casual encounters with strangers, to inanimate objects such as computers
and tables, to world politics and the state of affairs in the 20th
century. Writing in a variety of styles—lyrical poetry, prose poems,
playful rhyming verse, improvisation, variations on letters, narrative
poems—Morton moves from topic to topic, from landscape to landscape,
from theme to theme with great ease, always drawing the reader into new
situations, different personae, past and present and future times.

His style is refreshingly easy as he celebrates erotic and spiritual
love; the universal connectedness between human beings; and the
importance of understanding and acceptance between widely differing
individuals, races, and religions. The back-cover blurb suggests that
“whether lyrical, satirical, meditative, or wildly surreal, his poems
encourage us to be born again—to remake ourselves each day, to live
our lives with imagination and daring.” The epigram for the title
poem, “How to Be Born Again” (a phrase by e.e. cummings),
underscores this intent: “We can never be born enough.” And that,
perhaps, should be the ultimate aim of poetry, to help readers look at
life and the world around them, and especially at themselves, in a new
and different light every once in a while.