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Cartography--Selected Poems 1968-1998
ISBN 1-889960-06-3 paper, perfectbound, 150 pps --$15 |
John Moritz's Cartography represents a stirring, reverent, joyous return to native place. The "real" world and the represented world made continuous. The Plains becomes a plenum. The flat understood as full. ("Thing that I speke it moot be bare and Pleyn." -- Chaucer, Canterbury Tales) Plain-dealing in and from plenty, Moritz discovers a planar abundance: "I am engaged with/the landscape's/back pastures..." And a tender of the spirit: "and saw the blue prairie beyond/which reminded him of an ocean/reborn/beyond..."
-- Tom Clark
"Love Poems...seriously felt, randomly delt."
--Edward Dorn, Rolling Stock
Finely tuned, unobtrusively erudite, John Moritz's poems have always struck me as exemplary in their unself-conscious gentleness. Lessons learned from some of the twentieth century's masters, including Charles Olsen and Edward Dorn, have been internalized and transmuted into a word music that matches theirs and even surpasses them in unsuspected, intelligent, and emotionally convincing ways. This selection from thirty year's work sails on into the twenty-first century with flying colors.
-- Anselm Hollo
Excerpts from Cartography
***
May thought be
inside a thought
I have touched you by
and echo in a line
even though my left handedness
has slurred the page
or there would be a meadow
when there was a sea before us
and finally I could not read it
and now set that spring
again to flame
a tide withdraws
taking some small part of us
along these restless avenues
where only lovers would consult
a moon pale and deceptive
as the one above us
***
Cartography
Night falls over abandoned hills, over the brown of grass,
over those places the heart dwells. Those dark waves of
[inland sea
pitch on the arm of this vast lonliness.
The approach opens in the west. The map of a day gone
across the toss of bluestem hangs over the far slope.
A few scrub cottonwood, hedging the memory of a creek bed,
frame a resistence. In the last length of an orange
[filtered light,
the filter of sandstone passes through the broken tangle of
[branch.
***
O my venomous beauty
a scorpion hangs from each ear
out of silver
on your birthday
for you belong to the dark, unresolved south
when you turn away there is silence
and the territory your eyes scan
is certainty, unexplored
and instead of saying, come back
I recite the rose from a journey
I unsheathe for you out of season
and have been stung by your bleeding
the angels have left me over this
I must find my own speech for wine and tobacco
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