The Sentinel

By A.F. Moritz

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0887847900
• ISBN13: 9780887847905
• Release Date: March 2008
• Publisher: House of Anansi Press
• Length: 112 Pages
• Weight: 0.31 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.6" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Lonely Watcher

"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