"Contours and Contraditions"
Ben Meyerson (Canada)

The poetry of A.F. Moritz has always been a multi-layered undertaking, a reality that is brought to the fore in his chapbook Sound of Hungry Animals. Moritz seems to revel in the weariness of his own inspiration - how the voices from which he emerges are worn in, their histories well-travelled. His work seeks to formulate a new mythology out of the old: the measured despair that saturated poetry in the first half of the twentieth century, buoyed by a Romanticism seldom mustered by those of that era. Such a sensibility is, by necessity, extremely self-aware. Indeed, from the first poem, "Death", Moritz sets out to bare the double edge of glory and bitterness that adorns the act of passing on without ever really going away:

To be all sealed up in rest yet never be
refreshed, so never wake up again - no.
To sleep with my tyrant and my slave,
so never be punished, never revenged - no.

In Moritz's poems, mortality is an elastic affair; we are asked to live, through the verse, the consequences of being ancient.

Moritz ushers us into a world in which the natural is rendered at once grotesque and austere, his path aided by the excellent ink drawings of Rudolf Kurz. The collection, in many ways, typifies the constant tension between the revelatory enthusiasm of Romanticism and the dour sensibilities of Eliot and his Modernism. In this, Moritz displays a unique kinship to W.H. Auden - within his 'animals,' the insistent tugging of his struggle with past and present mirrors the British poet's conflict between "vines and olive trees" and the "artificial wilderness," the "sky like lead" upon Achilles' shield. Indeed, Moritz displays many of the same worries, bringing the sorrow that lurks beneath the pastoral into poignant relief:

...my eyes settled on a fallen rhododendron flower.
Its petals, intact and perfect, were in fact
not petals but five rays of a single disc,
shadowy rose, with a circular hole at the centre.
It was a skirt for a dead Romantic waist...
                                          - "Odds & Ends"

These preoccupations are old ones - it is easy to point to the Hellenistic poet Theocritus' lovelorn Cyclops as a truly ancient instance in which they surface. It seems that throughout the years there has been a procession of poets with their senses attuned to an edge of something akin to the tragic within the pastoral tropes and mythologies that drive so much of our art; Moritz is such a one. That they even endure, for him, is a fact that bears a certain sadness - they are "all sealed up in rest yet never [...] refreshed". Moritz seeks to impose his own poetics upon such preoccupations, and succeeds, retaining the echoes of past voices while, at the same time, preserving a strait of expression that is undoubtedly his. In "What Way", there are lines that could have been written by Auden, such as these: "The limestone / quarry of a poorer century, lipped in birds / and berries, treasured up, still treasures up", but Moritz proceeds to turn them on their head, caps them with his own neo-romantic grace by ending the thought with a couplet that entirely alters the way in which the 'Auden-esque' lines sit within the poem: "still waits behind their houses on airless nights / to be the dreams and drownings of new children."

It is fitting, then, that the illustrations gracing the chapbook are similarly two-faced. Moritz wields the natural as if to delve into poetic histories that only he can hear; Kurz seeks to pantomime nature, at once merging and dividing beast and earth. Kurz treats landscape as a frame for Moritz's muse, forcing the reader, at times, to closely examine his illustrations in order to discern the beasts from their backdrop. In the drawing inspired by "The Shore", for example, Kurz blurs the contours and contradictions - the bodies, even - that populate Moritz's poetic voice into an image that nearly matches the poetry in its textural richness. Indeed, the striking dimensions of the chapbook itself (over 12" in height) allow for a presentation that accentuates the interplay between the images and the poetry.

Sound of Hungry Animals, in short, is a well-measured collection that showcases Moritz's considerable talents as a poet. As a meditation, it manages to present its preoccupations with both compression and elegance. Equally, the poems do not seek to restrain themselves aesthetically; they are unabashedly what they are. This volume, though, more than anything else, furthers the case that, however outstanding the craft, however striking the imagery mustered by the poet, it is his willingness to place all of himself on the page that makes the work of A. F. Moritz so compelling. His poems breathe, are as human as he is, imperfections and all: there is a mastery in the way they gasp to a halt, allow themselves moments to stumble and get up again. The human, always, transcends such pale denominations as sensibility, and in this case, in this poetry, it refuses to be denied.