The Sentinel [Paperback]

A. F. Moritz (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 28, 2008

John Ashbery's esteem for A. F. Moritz has been seconded repeatedly by critics and readers. Starting in 1975 with Here and continuing through the years to Moritz's latest, The Sentinel, this poet has carved an important career in poetry. This new collection has already begun garnering praise and awards: the title poem was honored by the prestigious Poetry magazine. These poems, exploring everything from vanishing civilizations to nature's mysteries, display Moritz’s intelligence and insight blended with a supple craft and wordplay that have made his work unique in the field.

Editorial Reviews

Review

". . .praise is justified. . . .Moritz's sensibility is unique: melancholic, intellectual, comic, erotic, pitying. . . .Moritz is a difficult, often obscure poet, whose works can defy paraphrase. With images culled from dreams, he constructs allegories of love and oppression that communicate by strange association and mysterious overtones and vague or mysterious words. . . .the emotional content of Mortiz's work is so abundant and accessible that the reader is never lost. The Sentinel is a good place to become acquainted with Moritz's work. . . .a masterpiece. . . Moritz's free verse takes on a classical quality. . . The Sentinel is an exploration of the possibilities of hope. . . [Moritz is a] rare poet. . ." -- National Post

Product Details

• Paperback: 112 pages
• Publisher: House of Anansi Press (March 28, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0887847900
• ISBN-13: 978-0887847905
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.6 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,817,424 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Lonely Watcher, October 12, 2009

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This review is from: The Sentinel (Paperback)

"The Sentinel" is a collection of difficult poems, poems made of a convoluted rhetoric which challenges and
sometimes defeats the analyzing mind. It is astonishing that Moritz has devised a style which melds the
word-spewing proclivities of the Elizabethans with the paradoxical subtleties of a Kafka. The poems love their
language; they sound, when read aloud, like disquieting rhapsodies. Memorable lines are everywhere. At times the poems seem like incantations where comprehension is not the immediate first object:

"You that I loved all my life long,
you are not the one.
You that I followed, my line or path or way,
that I followed singing, and you
earth and air of the world the way went through,
and you who stood around it so it could be
the way, you forests and cities,
you deer and opposums struck by the lonely hunter
and left decaying; you paralyzed obese ones
who sat on a falling porch in a deep green holler
and observed me, your bald dog barking
as I stumbled past in a hurry along my line,
you are not the one. But you are
the one...."

This is aria-like in its control of breath and incantory with its repetition of the line " You are not the one "
which finds its resolution when the poet transitions to its responsorial: " You are the one."

Poem after poem has opening lines which issue dangerous invitations to Moritz's world:

"Through the infinite limits of the night in ruins
the mumbler goes with his sounds but they're all one." ( Dandelion )

"You'll lose the power to believe your dreams
you said when you were leaving, and they'll decay
from heart-made worlds to fear of this one." ( Cassandra )

"It is the moment when something must be done
and in this it is like every other moment
and one is ignoring it
and in this it is like any other moment...." ( The Moment )

"I woke up in a place familiar and alien,
like someone forgotten, someone that I loved,
even coupled with years ago, or last night
in a dream that won't come back." ( Place )


Moritz constructs parables which disturb an easy tolerance of our daily condition. Poems such as
" The Sentinel ", " Arrogance " and " The Tidal Wave " are disturbing ruminations on poetry, aging and
annihilation. " The Titanic " brings us on board a unique ghost ship: we only think the ship sunk due to a
successful ruse but it is still circling the seas with its passengers and crew augmented by those from the Marie
Celeste, tha abandoned cities of the Maya, Amelia Earhart, Ambrose Bierce, and B.Traven-- among others. This wry
thought experiment concludes with the statement that " fate and death are unreal. "

Moritz has a lyric gift too. " The Source " a four sentence, four question poem asks " What would silence be? " and
links the sun to the poet's central power to become " a song as soft as nothingness ". " Better Days " opens with
the following breath-taking sentence:

" Never anymore in a wash of sweetness and awe
does the summer I was seventeen come back
to my mind against my will, like a bird crossing

my vision."

While the poem provides the details of the summoned memories of the poet when he was seventeen, the poet
distinguishes between those and the unsummoned memories of his later self. We can control our rummaging in
the past but the issue here is what the mind returns to us unbidden, unsearched for-- its spontaneous
provisions.

We can suppose that the carefully retrieved memory of his being seventeen was once a memory of spontaneous
apparition to the poet's mind. We are provided enough detail to understand its intrinsic force. But this
force has waned, it no longer possesses a mysterious urgency. Its position as an overwhelming emanation
has been supplanted by another memory which had its origins in the poet's early manhood when he sat in a diner
night after night watching the same old man ordering his tea and opening his drawing pad. Not " holy drunkenness
and violation " but the " artist always in the same worn-out suit " are his nostalgia now." Though he calls the old man friend, he tells us he " never spoke with him " nor looked at his drawing pad. His reason for not speaking with him is that the poet wanted to disappear from there." Presumably, speaking with the old man would have committed
the poet to being more than a passing figure in that diner-world. That the poet did escape that world has its retribution: that world has not left him. It is the director of his unbidden memory. Though he now resides in
" the heaven of better days ", that heaven is perpetually subject to the unsummoned intrusion of a memory
which blots " out any other thought and image."

This collection has many instances of illumination. Its print is dark lightning; uttering its sentences
startles us as if they were mute thunder.