Page 45 - Trillium Book Awards 2021, ONTARIO CREATES

Trillium Book Award
Finalist
A.F. Moritz
As Far As You Know
House of Anansi Press
From one of the defining poets of his generation, a new collection that plumbs the depth of beauty, history, responsibility, and love.
As Far As You Know, acclaimed poet A. F. Moritz’s twentieth collection of poems, begins with two sections entitled “Terrorism” and “Poetry.” The book unfolds in six movements, yet it revolves around and agonizes over the struggle between these two catalyzing concepts, in all the forms they might take, eventually arguing they are the unavoidable conditions and quandaries of human life.
Written and organized chronologically around before and after the poet’s serious illness and heart surgery in 2014, these gorgeously unguarded poems plumb and deepen the reader’s understanding of Moritz’s primary and ongoing obsessions: beauty, impermanence, history, social conscience and responsibility, and, always and most urgently, love. For all its necessary engagement with worry, sorrow, and fragility, As Far As You Know sings a final insistent chorus to what it loves: “You will live.”
A. F. Moritz is widely considered one of the defining and most beloved lyric poets of his generation. His many honours include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Bess Hokin Prize, and an Ingram Merrill Fellowship. He currently serves as the sixth poet laureate of the City of Toronto.
Jury Comment: “I think about something,” writes A.F. Moritz in one of the outstanding lyrics that comprise his latest collection, “Immediately / a corral is formed.” The various corrals that encapsulate Moritz’s poetic imagination in this collection – from the ram that Abraham sacrifices to God in place of his son Isaac to a suite of poems inspired by the author’s 2014 open-heart surgery – provide ample evidence of the poet’s metaphoric reach and surpassing humanism. Nature, violence, death, and hope pulse throughout a collection that is as emotionally stirring as it is stylistically exuberant.
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