Featuring internationally acclaimed poetry from more than twenty books
and chapbooks published over forty-five years, The Sparrow is a
career-spanning selection that reveals how A. F. Moritz's dynamic,
ever-exploratory work is also a vast, singular poem.
A. F. Moritz has been called "one of the best poets of his generation"
by John Hollander and "a true poet" by Harold Bloom, who ranks him
alongside Anne Carson. He is the recipient of numerous awards and
honours throughout North America, including the Award in Literature of
the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Guggenheim Fellowship,
Poetry magazine's Beth Hokin Prize, the Ingram Merrill Fellowship, and
the Griffin Poetry Prize.
The Sparrow: Selected Poems of A. F. Moritz surveys forty-five years
of Moritz's published poems, from earlier, lesser-known pieces to the
widely acclaimed works of the last twenty years. Here are poems of
mystery and imagination; of identification with the other; of
compassion, judgement, and rage; of love and eroticism; of mature
philosophical, sociological, and political analysis; of history and
current events; of contemplation of nature; of exaltation and ennui,
fullness and emptiness, and the pure succession and splendour of earthly
nights and days.
The Sparrow is more than a selected poems; it is also a single vast
poem, in which the individual pieces can be read as facets of an
ever-moving whole. This is the world of A. F. Moritz -- a unique
combination of lyrical fire and meditative depth, and an imaginative
renewal of style and never-ending discovery of form.
