Early Poems

Bert Almon is a professor of English at the University of Alberta. He is
the author of Calling Texas, Earth Prime, and Mind the Gap.

A.F. Moritz is a prolific poet whose reputation has been slow to build.
He has written 14 books of poetry and numerous chapbooks, and won many
honours, including the Guggenheim Fellowship and the Award in Literature
of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. But only with
the short-listing of Rest on the Flight into Egypt for the Governor
General’s Literary Award in 2000 did he get the attention he deserves.
Early Poems makes his scarce work available. It reprints his first
chapbook, New Poems (1974), and his first four books of poetry, Here
(1975), Black Orchid (1981), Between the Root and the Flower (1982), and
The Visitation (1983). The volume comes with commendatory essays by Don
McKay and John Hollander, eminent endorsements from both sides of the
border.

Moritz is a visionary lyricist who manages to keep in touch with the
mundane. His poem “The Wheelwright” is typical of his art; he finds
an excellent symbol for the creative process, reminiscent of Whitman’s
great poem “Sparkles from the Wheel.” Moritz’s wheelwright has a
tiny wheel in his hand that somehow incorporates the macrocosm, and in
contemplating it we take a journey through the universe. Such journeys
are common in Moritz’s work.