Prospero as visionary poet
Great Silent Ballad, A.F. Moritz. House of Anansi, 2024.
In Great Silent Ballad, A.F. Moritz considers the human experience as a poem, “silent” or unspoken until expressed and, since every life tells a story, that poem is a “ballad.” Borrowing from W.B. Yeats’ (also Gwendolyn MacEwen’s) image of the dance as metaphor for art and human expression, the speaker in “Dancer Speaking,” imagines himself as that temporal dancer, and laments that at the end of the dance there is no “deserted garden” into which to retreat, but instead, in a shift to the everyday, he must return to a domestic scene, with “arguing, our doors slamming” (8). In “A Flower Giving Names to Adam and Eve,” Moritz evokes MacEwen’s concept of the “secret name” that, in his application, will not un-say the Word that created the world, but inspire meaning in the everyday: “. . . we’ll know / its secret name, the one it took for then / when we were with it in ignorance” that will be “our name for it, / its name for us.” (24). Building on traditional typology, Great Silent Ballad engages the reader with its own vision using elegant iconography.
Like a minstrel plucking strings, Moritz favours dramatic lines of unequal length with cadences that choreograph his subject. Within the larger “ballad” of this collection Moritz adapts other verse forms to his often stormy and romantic style. The irregular ode-like lines in the sonnet “To Those Who Like to Say, ‘I’m Not Much for Poetry’” carry an almost truculent tone aimed at those who deny poetry its power and the poet his “vocation.” “You don’t live if there’s no poetry,” the speaker argues, and “poetry’s with you / whether you know it or not, whether you think so or don’t” (20).
Whether a habit of reading poetry or a predisposition to “astonishment” comes first as the poet’s impulse to write, Moritz likens to the conundrum of the “chicken and the egg” in “Where” (26). A rigorous routine of waiting for inspiration is evident in “Meditation,” in which the poet remarks, “I sat down to still myself, arrive at no mind, / and await the coming of the voice of the spirit” (47). Following a romantic tradition, the poet sees himself as a vessel for inspiration, but an implied metaphor of a fish caught “on a hook” suggests that experience may not be altogether pleasant:
An ever more narrowed,
more trapped, desperate awareness
of everything — musky on a hook — that turned to blood
in the throat . . . (47)
After this frightening, an epiphany takes place and the poet emerges with “a spring” “in [his] heart and legs.” Added physiological details, with “sweat dropping in gobbets from [his] armpits,” a sensation of running in a “summer rain” after “lightning passes” are followed by the “scent of ozone” during a therapeutic experience (47).
A healthy self-irony tempers the romanticism in a number of Moritz’s poems. In “You Don’t Know,” the speaker admits his limitations as a poet, untravelled and so inexperienced. (71). Again, in the self-mocking “The Memoirs of A.F. Moritz,” the speaker presents moments of self-doubt during a glimpse in “a mirror / or an eyeball,” when he “was given a gaze / from out there beyond me, a look gone in a flash, / maybe a dream — I hope so” and “saw / an ugly fool.” The surreal choreographed stance that follows is comedic and relieving, as we tend to guffaw with the speaker:
My resolve
always to thrust my chin and hairline forward,
tuck in my nose, walk with toes directed,
straight forward, not splayed . . . (81)
Allowing the reader another laugh, the poet’s other self-pointer is “to quit sighing out loud,” a resolution he can practise for only a “quarter hour nonstop.” As on the “green island” of the imagination in the visionary “What Now,” “The Memoirs of A.F. Moritz” presents a Prospero-figure looking out from a cave when he “wake[s] up by magic in this city of yours,” but may be called “back before you know I’m gone” (82).
In the sonnet “The Living Fleet Eternity of Thought,” Moritz writes about a poem he failed to write, and so forgot and had to settle for a fragment (96). The poem is permeated with the disconsolate poet’s hubris that allowed him to assume he would remember the words to set them down later (an experience every poet has had). “A Poem Written in ‘Real Time’ about What I Was Doing as I Wrote It” emphasizes the literal foundation for a poem with concrete images necessary for meaning to arise on a symbolic level. The poem opens with a tableau of the poet “eating a cookie and sipping black coffee” as he reads a poem “about terror, death,” and “how even these are forgotten,” along with “one’s childhood” (119). Though once unavailable to the King of Portugal, this cookie embossed with a chateau in the chocolate coating on one rectangular side is commonplace today in grocery stores. The closing lines affirm the importance, not only of this type of cookie (that harkens back to historic times), but also register the role of the particular cookie within the literal scene inside this poem — both as image and symbol within its whole cloth:
. . . This is not
as naïve a poem as you think it is. I don’t even mind
if you say it’s correct except that it happened to you, not me,
and really was not a cookie, a coffee, and a poem.
Though you would be wrong. (120)
That the reader might consider the experience “happened” to themself suggests the poem’s universality. With the unexpected turn, “[t]hough you would be wrong,” we are reminded the experience from which the universal arises is grounded in the particular cookie the poet happened to eat while drinking his coffee black and writing the poem.
Great Silent Ballad is a poet’s poetry book in one respect, but also quite mesmerizing in its visionary scenes with a Prospero figure looking out from a sea-cave at an ocean beyond. The poet’s voice engages the reader within its humanism as the speaker delves into his vulnerable childhood and a self-avowedly meagre experience outside of imaginative truth.
— gillian harding-russell is a poet, editor and reviewer who has published five poetry collections, and recent poems are forthcoming or have been published in Queen’s Quarterly.
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