The Ruined Cottage

Chris Knight is a copy editor at Canadian Press.

These are poems that spring from the concrete of cities and the cracked
concrete of human aging. A.F. Moritz strives to combine these materials
into one new substance, but often the mixing is not thorough enough.
“Snow in May,” for example, gives us “light flakes blown from the
new leaves, the blue sky, / and sheaths of ice that bloom with light
along / the confused branches of the spindle tree”—but there is no
human presence.

However, a good many poems stand out. “Home Again Home Again,” for
example, is about losing one’s parents in the past and trying to find
them again. “And check the records: / what is written down says
nothing. ... You went back and the bones of the native town / were like
that, records from which something had escaped.” In “The Stump,”
“The Corn,” and “The Five-Foot Shelf,” living plants and their
dead debris become reminders of human qualities and mysteries.
“Whatever is behind the corn,” writes Moritz, “mere space, / or
heaven, the zone where God permits himself / free and pure action, or
nothing—you can’t see it.”

Although not with unswerving consistency, this free verse often unites
the human, the city, and the unseen in a deliberately rough-hewn,
thought-provoking whole. And it does this often enough to make the
search worthwhile.