Great Silent Ballad by A. F. Moritz

There’s a saying that you don’t get a second chance to make a first impression. In that case, there’s no need for A. F. Moritz to worry about his poetry collection Great Silent Ballad. This 144-page book has a satisfying heft, and is packaged with an attractive cover. The off-white, textured paper offers a pleasant sense of luxury, the quality of the printing suggesting a care for the contents within.

Great Silent Ballad is Moritz’s twenty-second book of poetry. Divided into seven sections, including ones titled “Why Do We Read?,” “When I Was a Child,” and “The Death of Yves Bonnefoy,” the poems deal with a wide range of themes, including death, the value of poetry, and musings about memory. Written in a lyrical style, some of the poems evoke a sense of wonder, while others riff on the natural world, music, or cultural phenomena—or sometimes a combination of these things in the same poem.

Some of the poems are written in defence of the value of poetry. “To Those Who Like to Say ‘I’m Not Much For Poetry’ ” is one such. Moritz states, “You don’t live if there’s no poetry: you don’t live / at all, or if you appear to yourself to be living, you’re not.” The poem goes on to say that “…poetry’s with you / whether you know it or not, whether you think so or don’t,” adding that “Poetry’s there in the earth and waters and light and wind.”

“Why Do We Read?” muses, “who knew the figure of that world / was passing away, like this one? So permanently / we lived in it.” This poem captures the nostalgia we sometimes feel about the past, particularly when it comes to the things we thought were constants that would go on forever.

There are echoes of the same sentiment in “The Death of Yves Bonnefoy”:

So a world is gone
and it calls us—how can this be,
a world with a voice? It must be another
kind of world…
Other poems reach toward the ineffable. “An Angel,” for example, includes the lines,

invisible, but appearing now and then, we say,
for instance in a bird’s wing, an easy
lilt of glide
joining here to there.

Nature is also a feature in some of the poems. “I Know I Was” offers a strong sense of place:

the mauve cloud, the stars
and their cousins the spring
beauties in the grass. Dim vanishings
into elderberry thickets in fruit
in humid chilly fog, August mornings.

“Seeds People Thoughts” criss-crosses between the tangible and the intangible:

Elm seeds—pale green whole notes—softly
land on the prairie of dark sharp greens:
the lawn. The same way thoughts
land on the white expanses of a notebook.

Moritz has a knack for expressing wonder without becoming maudlin. “Mentioning,” for example, says, “each item, each moment of an item, is / a greater world than the world.”

In “A Muse,” Mortiz describes “the sullen stiffness of the flute, metal on which / the flicked fingernail clicks.” But appearances don’t tell the whole story: “played, it sends out a stream that is nothing but water’s / invisible sinuosity—stream without banks, without / a beautiful land to sparkle in.”

There is even humour here and there. “No Longer” has the lines, “The garden we planned and worried / and sometimes halfway made—what will occur / to that? What fresh ideas will it get?”

“When Chappie Got Out” features some startling comparisons:

…Murray McLauchlan
sings lovingly of an old farmer
with “a face like a shoe.” Chappie
had a face like the imprint of a shoe on the front
of an unrecognizable corpse’s head.

The poem goes on to add:

What did he do when he went home at night?
I saw him at home. It was like
when you turn off the lawnmower and put it in the shed
and you close the door
and it’s sitting in there.

Loneliness, the press of humanity in the city, nostalgia, the inevitability of change, aging, the way all of our choices seem to take us to the same place—these and other themes are found and explored between the pages of Great Silent Ballad.

Bruce Meyer: Essays on His Works contains a chapter in which Laurence Hutchman interviews Meyer. During the interview, Meyer says “a poem is a container for the exponential wonder of a moment.” Masterful, lyrical, and evocative, Great Silent Ballad captures many such moments.

A.F. MORITZ’s most recent books from House of Anansi Press are Great Silent Ballad (2024), As Far as You Know (2020) and The Sparrow: Selected Poems (2018). Three of his books have been finalists for the Governor General’s Award; The Sentinel won the Griffin Poetry Prize. His work overall has received the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Award in Literature of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and other recognitions. A.F. Moritz was Poet Laureate of Toronto from 2019 to 2023.

Publisher: House Of Anansi (September 24, 2025)
Paperback: 8″ x 6″ | 144 pp
ISBN: 9781487012960

Lisa Timpf

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Lisa Timpf is a retired HR and communications professional who lives in Simcoe, Ontario. Her writing has appeared in New Myths, Star*Line, The Future Fire, Triangulation: Habitats, and other venues. Lisa’s speculative haibun collection, In Days to Come, is available from Hiraeth Publishing. You can find out more about Lisa’s writing at http://lisatimpf.blogspot.com/.